Stern Decoration on 17th Century Dutch built ships

Hi all,

we have here an image of a contemporary model of a 17th century Dutch ship of war, sadly the model no longer exists, it was destroyed by bombing during WWII so it's no longer available for us to examine. There's something I noticed looking at this image and also other contemporary material of the stern decoration of Dutch 17th century warships: if you check the sculptures beneath the windows you can see that they fan-out towards to the top. Now I intially believed that this was due to the photographic distortion we have here as the figures' heads are closer to the photographer than their feet.

We have here a van de Velde Portrait of the Dutch ship the Waasdorp and here we can see observe same: these figures fan outwards.

Here we have a plan of the Vasa's stern and beneath the large windows we see a similar row of figures, and, yes, they too fan out. BUT - this is a plan-view, there is no photographic distortion.

And also this view from van Ijk's Scheepsbouw Konst shows us the same (though somewhat exaggerated):

Is this a common feature on Dutch built ships? Apparently the figures beneath the top row of windows on Vasa's stern were perfectly upright, while those beneath the bottom two windows fan outwards.

A lot of van de Velde drawings support this oberservation (but not all).

I don't know if there was any meaning behind it, perhaps it was only a widespread design feature. Also I don't what what the sculptures on Vasa represent but on the Hohenzollernmodel they apparently portrait alternating lions and Turks. It appears as if indeed in addition to the photographic distortion these sculptures were not perfectly upright but also fanned out everso slightly. This is sure how I'm going to do it on my model.

Peter