The Senate Hall: 185 Portraits and a Great Deal of Discussion

There are quite a few misconceptions about the Senate Hall in the Academy Building on Domplein. There has also always been discussion about the 185 portraits of professors that look down at you from the walls, for instance. At the end of 2026, a major restoration of the Academy Building will begin. A good moment to take a closer look at the long history of the hall and its collection.

Starting out as a messy room for religious instruction

The hall as we know it has only existed since 1924. The dignified Latin name 'conclave academicum' for the very first Senate Chamber could not disguise the fact that it was really just a room in the beadle's house. On Sundays it also doubled as a catechism room, and was often left in a dirty state. The professors were greatly relieved when, in 1686, they were able to take into use a building of their own in which to hold their meetings. This was located alongside the two lecture halls in the Groot Kapittelhuis, where the Aula of the Academy Building now stands.

A tribute to those who came before us 

Soon afterwards, it was decided to enliven the new Senate Hall with portraits of professors. These had to be commissioned by the professors themselves and then donated to the university. And speaking of donations: in 1694 the Senate Hall received a chimneypiece depicting the two mayors whose support had made the founding of the university possible. That piece can now be seen in Room 1636.

An important question is: why are these portraits there, and why must we preserve them? In academia we have always kept images of our predecessors, for the simple reason that we recognise we did not invent everything ourselves. In the Italian Renaissance, people spoke of 'ritratti di uomini famosi': portraits of famous men. In the University Museum, for example, hangs a portrait of F.C. Donders with, in the background, a bust of Hermann von Helmholtz, whom he admired.

We stand on the shoulders of others, even of those whose ideas were not entirely our own.

Hundreds of professors' portraits 

Over the centuries, the number of portraits grew substantially to more than 500: painted, drawn, and sculpted. When the number of laboratories and institutes expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century, portraits were placed there too. The Senate Hall itself burst at the seams with all these images. 

Because the hall had a barrel-vaulted ceiling, it was no longer possible to hang the portraits flush against the wall. As a result, they came to function rather like a ceiling painting. A renovation in 1869 did not help matters either. After 1900, new portraits were again placed at an angle against the ceiling.

The Academy Building, completed in 1894, soon proved too small. It was therefore decided to add an extension containing space for a new Senate Hall. This came into use in 1924. In terms of size, it was also better suited to the hall's original purpose: as a meeting room for the assembled professors who, together with the Board of Trustees, formed the university's governing body. 

The placement of the portraits in the new hall was determined on aesthetic grounds by Willem Vogelsang, professor of art history. He arranged them by century, though not by seniority of appointment or age. The portraits hang there to this day in roughly the same order as then.

Censorship and political influence 

Taken together, the portraits at Utrecht University form a unique historical collection of portrait art. Not all the portraits in our Senate Hall are of equally high quality, but there are some real gems among them. One of my favourites is the portrait of the philosopher Opzoomer by Jozef Israëls. Beautiful or not, these works give our predecessors a human face, so that they are no longer just a name on the title page of their scholarly work.

As I mentioned, there has always been controversy surrounding this collection, right up to the present day. For political reasons, the portrait of the eighteenth-century anti-Orangist IJsbrand van Hamelsveld was once removed, fitted with a disapproving inscription, and later restored and rehung once the political tide had turned.

More recently, there have again been discussions with a political dimension, sometimes going so far that some would like to see the collection removed from the hall altogether. They regard the collection as an expression of patriarchy and an affront to the work that women have done at the university. Something was already done about this in 2012, when Yvonne van Rooy, then Chair of the Executive Board, decided to commission posthumous portraits of three prominent female professors: Cornelia de Vogel, Jacoba Hol, and Johanna Westerdijk. A series of photographs of female professors was also produced, which can be seen in Room 1636.

This way, our predecessors are no longer merely a name on the title page of their scholarly work.

Radical restorations 

There has also been discussion about the design of the hall itself. Even when the current Senate Hall first came into use in 1924, there were protests: from the poet Jan Engelman, among others about its historicising interior. Attention was drawn to the bizarre stylistic clash between the modern Art Deco and Amsterdam School-influenced architecture of the staircase (later irreverently nicknamed "the bathtub") and the Senate Hall itself.

The collection itself has not survived the centuries unscathed. Restorations carried out over the years have not always been equally careful. Around 1960, it was decided to "marouflage" the paintings. That is a process in which they are glued under pressure onto hardboard, which effectively flattens the texture of the paint. Art historically, this is open to criticism, but without such treatment it would be impossible to preserve a collection like ours while also making it visible to large numbers of visitors on a daily basis.

We stand on the shoulders of others, even those whose ideas were not entirely our own. You could see the Senate Hall as a form of machismo. A ‘look at us’ but, paradoxically, also as a form of modesty. And that is something you can simply explain, placing it within its historical context.