In May 1664 the Norbertine nuns of Leliëndaal, whose convent name means the vale of lilies, were told that the façade of their half-built church was leaning forward, and when the architect proposed ways of disguising the fault they refused them and had the front taken down and rebuilt. The dispute was one of several with Lucas Faydherbe (1617–1697), the leading sculptor of Mechelen, over cost and workmanship, and together with the demolition it delayed the building by roughly five years, so that after the laying of the foundation stone in 1662 the first mass was not celebrated until 1670 and the church was not consecrated until 1674 (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997). The difficulty is not surprising, since Leliëndaal was the first substantial building Faydherbe designed on his own, and he undertook it as a sculptor with little experience of construction.
Faydherbe had trained and worked as a sculptor for most of his career before he turned to architecture. He was born in Mechelen in 1617 into a family of image-makers, the son of the sculptor Hendrik Faydherbe, whose sister Maria was herself a sculptor of some standing, and of Cornelia Franchoys, who came from a line of painters (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997). In 1636 he went to Antwerp and into the studio of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), who treated the young man almost as one of the household, left him in charge of the studio, and wrote him a run of letters that still survives, easy and warm in tone (Magurn, 1955). Rubens held that sculpture and painting were a single art, and Faydherbe learned to turn the master’s swelling, muscular manner into carved figures, returning to Mechelen in 1640, the year Rubens died, as the leading sculptor of his city (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997).He took up architecture only in his forties, and he approached the design of a church much as he approached a large sculptural commission, as a single composition to be resolved as a whole.
That approach is evident in the concentration of ornament on a single face of the building, since the side walls are of plain buttressed brick with sandstone dressings, while the front toward the Bruul, which originally screened the choir at the east end rather than serving as an entrance, is faced in sandstone and composed as three bays in two superposed storeys, articulated by ringed pilasters with Ionic capitals, the broad central bay set beneath a round-arched niche, a broken pediment and a scrolled gable. The design carries the Rubensian character Faydherbe had absorbed in Antwerp, and it belongs to the Brabantine Baroque idiom developed earlier in the century by Jacques Francart (1583–1651), whose Beguinage church in Mechelen Faydherbe had completed, so that the attribution sometimes made to the Leuven Jesuit architect Willem Hesius, and the placing of his work in Antwerp, are seeems both mistaken (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997; Vlieghe, 1998). The front no longer stands as Faydherbe left it, because its crowning gable was taken down in the nineteenth century for fear that it would collapse, and its figures have changed with the building’s owners, the central niche that first held a monstrance receiving a statue of the Virgin in 1814, and the statue of Saint Norbert set above it in 1715, whose plinth carries a chronogram naming him guardian of the vale of lilies, giving way under the Jesuits to a Saint Ignatius in 1901 (Eeman, Kennes and Mondelaers, 1984). Inside, the church is a single aisle of five bays whose ringed pilasters, entablature and transverse arches are all of black marble and carry cross-rib vaults, lit by two tiers of segmental-headed windows in black marble surrounds, so that the dark stone stands out sharply against the pale plaster of the walls.
The community did not survive the reforms of the late eighteenth century. The priory was suppressed by the Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) in 1783, its buildings passing briefly to the Ursulines in 1786 and then, in 1798, into the hands of the civil hospices, which kept the former convent as a home for the elderly and orphans and let the church fall to secular use, as a warehouse and joinery, with a wall run across it for an infirmary and the gable of the front pulled down. Worship resumed in 1834, and when the Jesuits acquired the church in 1900 and 1901 their architect reversed its plan, moving the choir from the east to the west and turning the two small doors in the Bruul front, until then a screen rather than an entrance, into the way in, besides adding a Lourdes grotto and new furniture (Eeman, Kennes and Mondelaers, 1984). A good deal of the original decoration nonetheless remains in place. The high altar still carries a carved group of the Virgin among angels by Artus Quellinus the Younger (1625–1700); a seventeenth-century marble screen with three bas-reliefs on its balustrade is attributed to Faydherbe himself; the choir panelling was made up from the seventeenth-century stalls; and a seventeenth-century painting of the investiture of Saint Norbert by Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg (1630–1676) and Lucas Franchoys the Younger (1616–1681), Faydherbe’s uncle on his mother’s side, hangs in the church (Eeman, Kennes and Mondelaers, 1984). What went was the finest of the movable furnishing, sold during and after the French period and now in Saint Rumbold’s Cathedral, among it the great oak pulpit of 1723 by Michiel van der Voort the Elder (1667–1737) and Theodoor Verhaegen (1701–1759), a marble communion rail of 1678 by Quellinus the Younger, a painted and gilded tabernacle of 1736, and six marble medallions by Pieter Valckx (1734–1785); the oak confessionals, pulpit and panelling now in the church are of the early twentieth century, brought in during the Jesuits’ time.
Referenecs
Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed (n.d.) ‘Voormalige norbertinessenpriorij Leliëndaal’, Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed. Brussels: Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed. Available at: https://inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be/ (Accessed: 24 May 2024).
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: Stedelijke Musea
Magurn, R. S. (ed. and trans.) (1955) The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Vlieghe, H. (1998) Flemish Art and Architecture 1585–1700. New Haven and London: Yale University Press