Historiographer; professor of art- and cultural history. Schulte Nordholt studied German language and literature, history, and art history at the University of Amsterdam between 1932 and 1939. The next ten years he first taught German and later history at the Rijnlands Lyceum in Wassenaar. During the war, in 1943, he was arrested by the German authorities and spent some time in detention. In 1948 he received his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam with a historiography of the Renaissance, Het beeld der Renaissance. His adviser was the historian Jan Romein (1893-1962).