In 1659 the Jesuits of Mechelen acquired the relic that would govern the scale of their greatest building in the city, a portion of the arm of Saint Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the missionary reputed to have baptised many thousands across India, the Moluccas and Japan. The chapel of their noviciate soon proved too small for the pilgrims who came to venerate it, and the Society resolved to raise a church equal to the crowds, one intended for a shifting body of visitors rather than a settled parish (Brouwers, 1977). The building was placed under Xavier and under the founder of the order, Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), and throughout the Jesuit period it was known as the Sint-Franciscus-Xaveriuskerk, the Church of Saint Francis Xavier. Its present and far longer title dates only from the dissolution of the Society: in Dutch, Kerk van de Heilige Apostelen Petrus en Paulus op visitatie bij de Heilige Ignatius van Loyola en de Heilige Franciscus Xaverius; in English, the Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul on Visitation to Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier; in ordinary use, the Sint-Pieters-en-Pauluskerk.
The plot they built on had belonged to the house of Burgundy. In 1477, newly widowed, Margaret of York (1446–1503) took over the Hof van Kamerijk on the Keizerstraat, a mansion raised by the Keldermans, Mechelen’s dynasty of master-masons, and added a great reception hall; within a generation it had become the Keizershof, the imperial court where the future Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) spent much of his childhood. The ruling archdukes handed the palace to the Society of Jesus in 1611 for a noviciate and college, and the Jesuits put their church and convent across its grounds. A wing of the old palace still stands beside the church, restored in the nineteenth century and now the city theatre, while directly opposite rises the palace of Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), once regent of the Netherlands, so that the Baroque front of a pilgrimage church faces two survivors of the Habsburg court.
The money for it came from Antwerp, by way of a refusal. An Antwerp widow whose three sons had entered the Society left a fund for a second Jesuit church in her own city, meant to stand beside the great Sint-Carolus-Borromeus; when the Antwerp chapter and magistrate blocked the plan in 1657, the order carried the budget and the design to Mechelen (Eeman, Kennes and Mondelaers, 1984). The family’s single tie to the arts ran through the designer, the widow’s son Antoon Losson (1612–1678), a Jesuit and self-taught architect who drew the plans and helped lay the first stone but died the year the church opened. From 1669 he had the help of a far more seasoned figure, Willem van Hees, latinised as Guilielmus Hesius (1601–1690), a Jesuit mathematician and astronomer who corresponded with Christiaan Huygens and had already designed the Saint Michael’s church in Leuven.
A Jesuit church of this generation was seldom invented from nothing, and this one wore its models in plain sight. The plan followed the now-vanished Jesuit church at Ypres, itself descended from Pieter Huyssens’s (1577–1637) Saint-Loup at Namur and Sint-Walburga at Bruges, while the façade took up the colossal two-storey order of the Brussels Jesuit church by the court architect Jacques Francart (1583–1651), the design that had set the pattern for Jesuit fronts across the province (Eeman et al., 1984). The first stone went down in 1670, the first mass was said in 1677, and the solemn consecration waited until 1694; the crowning gable, the one wholly original stroke, was finished only in 1709, decades after Losson’s death and it seems against his drawings (Hammenecker, 1976).
Inside, everything bends towards the sermon. A wide central vessel runs between two aisles under a single continuous vault, carried on tall columns that keep the view clear from any seat to the pulpit and the high altar, the aisled and column-divided plan a preaching order wanted for a church meant to be heard. The furnishings that fill it are the real reason to come, and they gather up two generations of the region’s finest carvers (Eeman et al., 1984).
The marble altars belong to the sculptor who did most to carry Rubens’s manner into stone. The side altars are given to Lucas Faydherbe (1617–1697), born into a Mechelen family of sculptors and alabaster-carvers, apprenticed at nineteen to Rubens in Antwerp and left running the workshop in the painter’s last years; he cut ivories under Rubens’s eye, and when a hurried marriage sent him home without the expected journey to Italy, it was Rubens’s word that eased him into the Mechelen guild (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997). A few years before the Jesuits began their church, Faydherbe had built the marble high altar of St Rumbold’s Cathedral a short walk away, to a design by the same Hesius who would advise Losson, so the small world of Mechelen’s Baroque keeps circling back on itself (Eeman et al., 1984).
The pulpit answers the altars in oak, and it came from Antwerp’s grandest carving dynasty. Made around 1700 by Hendrik Frans Verbruggen (1654–1724), the son and grandson of sculptors married into the Quellinus family, it belongs to the new fashion for the naturalistic pulpit, in which the structure disappears into a single carved scene; Verbruggen’s masterpiece in the manner, made for the Jesuit church of Leuven and now in the cathedral of Brussels, sets Adam and Eve beneath the Virgin (Eeman et al., 1984). At Mechelen he balanced the whole pulpit on a globe. The four then-known continents sit personified with their animals at the foot, America with a turtle and a snake, Asia turbaned beside a leopard, Africa in elephant hide with a crocodile, Europe with her cornucopia and book; above them run the emblems of the evangelists and medallions of Jesuit saints, and a pair of trumpeting angels lifts a canopy carved with the Holy Spirit. The argument in wood repeats the one the relic had made, the faith carried out to the ends of the earth with Xavier as its agent.
The aisles hold the church’s strangest feature, and its best joke. Fourteen confessionals, carved between 1683 and 1684 and worked into the wainscoting, are the joint labour of Nicolaas van der Veken (1637–1709), a Mechelen pupil of Faydherbe, and the Antwerp sculptor Ludovicus Willemssens (1630–1702), among others (Eeman et al., 1984; De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997). Fourteen is a great many for one church, and local wit blamed the cattle market on the neighbouring Veemarkt, where the trading was held to involve a good deal of lying; the plainer reason is the pilgrimage, since a visitor who meant to touch the relics was to reach them free of sin, and confession on that scale needed room.
When the order was dissolved, the building barely changed. The Society of Jesus was suppressed in 1773, and the neighbouring parish of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, its own medieval church by then crumbling, asked to move in; the diocese kept the Jesuit dedication and set the parish’s apostles over it, which is how the church came by its long double name (Brouwers, 1977). Almost nothing else was touched, so the interior survives as a single Baroque ensemble of the 1680s to the 1700s, and a church shaped for a missionary order and its pilgrims went on serving an ordinary parish without surrendering its pulpit, its fourteen confessionals, or its argument that the faith had been sent around the world from this spot.
References
Brouwers, L. (1977) De Jezuïeten te Mechelen in de 17de en 18de eeuw [The Jesuits in Mechelen in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries]. Mechelen
De Nijn, H., Vlieghe, H. and Devisscher, H. (eds.) (1997) Lucas Faydherbe 1617–1697. Mechels beeldhouwer & architect [Lucas Faydherbe 1617–1697. Mechelen Sculptor and Architect]. Mechelen
Eeman, M., Kennes, H. and Mondelaers, L. (1984) Inventaris van het cultuurbezit in België. Architectuur. Stad Mechelen. Binnenstad [Inventory of the Cultural Heritage of Belgium. Architecture. The City of Mechelen. Inner City], Bouwen door de eeuwen heen in Vlaanderen [Building Through the Centuries in Flanders], 9n. Brussels and Ghent. Available at: https://id.erfgoed.net/erfgoedobjecten/3466 and https://id.erfgoed.net/erfgoedobjecten/3467 (Accessed: 22 May 2024).
Hammenecker, H. (1976) De bouwgeschiedenis van de Sint-Pieter- en Pauluskerk te Mechelen [The Building History of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Mechelen], unpublished licentiate dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven