On 8 November 1557 the most powerful judge in the Habsburg Netherlands was carried to his grave inside a parish church he had spent his presidency making worthy of him. Lambert de Briaerde, born at Dunkirk around 1493 and dead at Mechelen, had led the Great Council of Mechelen since 1532, the supreme court whose authority ran across the Dutch-, French- and German-speaking territories the Habsburgs governed as a single jurisdiction. The bishop of Tournai read the service, and de Briaerde was laid in the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament, a side chapel raised by the parish’s wealthiest men on a scale to rival the church’s own choir, so that a burial place for a judge came to stand beside the liturgical heart of the building. His widow, Margaretha Micault (c.1509–1596), would be laid beside him nearly forty years later (Apers, 2018). The funeral compresses the reason St John’s is furnished as richly as it is: for centuries the parish housed the jurists of the Council, and their wealth and standing settled into its walls.
The parish’s wealth had an administrative source. The Great Council had been fixed at Mechelen since the 1470s, and it kept the town’s most senior lawyers, all appointed by the crown and trained in civil and canon law, living within a few streets of one another (Apers, 2018). Their parish church, dedicated jointly to John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, had grown from a thirteenth-century chapel into a full Brabantine Gothic church consecrated in 1483, cruciform in plan, with a three-aisled nave and a tall western tower, the whole raised in white sandstone (Eeman, Kennes and Mondelaers, 1984). The architecture is sober, almost austere, and a visitor who knew only the plain exterior would not predict the interior at all. The money is legible in the furnishings and hardly at all in the stone.
The century that followed the chapel’s completion treated the church roughly. An explosion at the nearby Zandpoort in 1546 did serious damage; during the religious wars Calvinist iconoclasts stripped the interior, and for five years the building served as a barracks and a stable before it was reconsecrated in 1585. In 1645 the parish duties passed to the neighbouring Oratorians, who oversaw an extensive eighteenth-century refitting, the Baroque tunnel vault receiving its stucco decoration in 1772 (Eeman et al., 1984). Whatever survives inside St John’s has survived at least one attempt to destroy or repurpose it, a point easy to forget in front of an interior that now looks settled and permanent.
The high altar carries the work every visitor comes for. On 27 December 1616 the churchwardens signed a contract with Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) for a triptych, delivered the following year and retouched by his own hand once it was in place; the agreed 1,800 guilders were still being paid off in 1624. The central panel shows the Adoration of the Magi. Its wings are painted on both faces and turn on a mechanism that lets the whole set be shown open or closed: the Baptism of Christ backed by the Beheading of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist on Patmos backed by the same saint in the cauldron of boiling oil, so that the two patrons of the church run across the sequence (Eeman et al., 1984). The device is ingenious and rarely noticed, since most visitors only ever see the open face.
The frame around the triptych belongs to a later taste. Around 1768 the paintings were set into a new portico altar designed by the Mechelen sculptor Theodoor Verhaegen (1701–1759) and carried out, after his death, by his pupil Pieter Valckx (1734–1785), who also supplied the pulpit and other furnishings in the same idiom (Eeman et al., 1984). The arrangement places a Baroque altarpiece of the 1610s inside a frame of the 1760s, two generations of Flemish taste stacked one behind the other, which is the kind of layering a church furnished slowly by a wealthy parish tends to produce.
The rest of the collection keeps company with the Rubens. A triptych by Gaspar de Crayer (1584–1669) sets Christ meeting Veronica on the road to Calvary between two scenes from the life of St Norbert on its wings, and further seventeenth- and eighteenth-century canvases of the Flemish school hang throughout, among them work by Lucas Franchoys the Younger (1616–1681) and the academy painter Willem Herreyns (1743–1827), alongside carved woodwork that includes the confessionals of 1703 (Eeman et al., 1984). The church earns its old reputation as one of the richest in Mechelen, though ‘rich’ here describes an accumulation assembled across two centuries rather than a single campaign.The predella beneath the Rubens triptych once carried three small scenes; the central Christ on the Cross, from the studio, is still in place, but the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Resurrection were carried off during the French Revolution and never came back, and both now hang in the museum at Marseille.
References
Apers, C. (2018) ‘Lambert de Briaerde (ca. 1494–1557). Voorzitter van de Grote Raad van Mechelen en raadsheer van keizer Karel’ [Lambert de Briaerde (c.1494–1557). President of the Great Council of Mechelen and Councillor of Emperor Charles], Handelingen van de Koninklijke Kring voor Oudheidkunde, Letteren en Kunst van Mechelen [Proceedings of the Royal Circle for Archaeology, Letters and Art of Mechelen], 122. 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. (Entry ‘Parochiekerk Sint-Jan Baptist en Evangelist’ available online through the Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed of the Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed, id.erfgoed.net/erfgoedobjecten/59217.)