Our Lady across the Dyle is the second church of Mechelen, and for centuries it behaved as though it meant to be the first. Raised from the fourteenth century onward in the Brabantine Gothic of the region, on the site of the town’s oldest parish church, which the great fire of 1342 had destroyed, it grew into a building that could rival the cathedral of Saint Rumbold not only in scale but in wealth. That wealth was the guilds’ doing, since the trades and craft brotherhoods of the city each kept an altar here and dressed it with work that advertised their standing, so that the interior became a kind of ledger of Mechelen’s commercial pride. Little of it has had an easy history. The building was attacked by Protestants in the sixteenth century, caught in the Spanish Fury of November 1576, stripped under the French Revolution and bombed in both world wars, its nineteenth-century glass shattered in 1945, so that what stands today is a much-handled remnant of what once filled it.
The oldest survivor in the church is also one of its most arresting. Our Lady of the Scheve Lee, a Madonna of the fourteenth century carried over from the earlier building, is the only free-standing statue of its date left in Mechelen, and it owes its curious name to the pronounced sway of the Virgin’s hip, the scheve lee or crooked stance that throws her whole body into a soft curve (Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed, n.d.). Around it the centuries have left their deposits. A carved Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows of 1626 is the work of Antoon Faydherbe, of the Mechelen dynasty whose most gifted member, Lucas Faydherbe (1617–1697), trained in Rubens’s studio and set his own stone figures against the nave piers here; the Baroque furnishings run from the densely emblematic pulpit that Willem Ignatius Kerricx (1682–1745) finished in 1718 to the high altar of 1690, built in the Roman manner to frame the Last Supper of Jan Erasmus Quellinus (1634–1715), and on to the Altar of Our Lady of the Sun that Pieter Valckx (1734–1785) carved in 1775. Restorers have kept adding to the tally in our own day, recovering a sixteenth-century wall painting of the prodigal son in the skippers’ chapel and, in 2008, a pair of fourteenth-century figures of Saint Christopher and Saint George high in the towers.
The church’s one indisputable masterpiece was ordered to the same end as the rest, to make a guild’s wealth visible. The fish-sellers of Mechelen, who around the same time put up a guild house they called De Grooten Zalm, the Great Salmon, on the Zoutwerf, commissioned Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) to paint a triptych of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (De wonderbare visvangst) for their altar, and it was in place by 1619. Rubens gave them not one catch but three: the great haul of Luke’s gospel at the centre, the apostles hauling at nets almost bursting, and on the wings two further miraculous fish, Peter drawing from the mouth of one the coin to pay the temple tax, and Tobias landing, on the angel’s instruction, the fish whose organs would heal his father (Bulckens, 2017). Cynthia Lawrence has read the three scenes together as studies in obedience, each catch following an act of faith, and set them in their moment, when Flemish fishermen were drifting north to the Protestant provinces and a Catholic guild had reason to declare where it stood, so that early documents even suggest the guildsmen had themselves worked in among the apostle-fishermen (Lawrence, 1984). What makes the picture rarer still is simply that it has stayed, one of the few great Rubens altarpieces never carried off to a gallery, made to be met, as it still is, by a worshipper looking up from the floor of the church.
The triptych’s later history has been one of coming apart and being patched together. French troops carried it to Paris in 1794, and though the main panels came home after Napoleon’s fall, in 1816, the predella never fully followed, its scenes split to this day between a museum at Nancy and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, so that the base the altarpiece once rose from survives only in fragments abroad (Bulckens, 2017). Its place in the church has shifted as well. The picture no longer hangs on the fishmongers’ altar it was made for but in the right transept, where it was installed during the restoration of 1962 to 1968, after the war-damaged Baroque Holy Cross Altar that had stood there was pulled down and its fragments lost; the angel embracing a cross that had once crowned that vanished altar, carved by Jan-Frans Boeckstuyns (1650–1734), was traced and bought back by the parish only in 2017 (Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed, n.d.). The Rubens, in the end, stands on the ground of a destroyed altar with its own footing scattered across Europe, a survivor twice over in a church that has spent seven centuries losing its furniture and hunting it down again.
References
Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed (n.d.) ‘Parochiekerk Onze-Lieve-Vrouw over de Dijle’, Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed. Brussels: Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed. Available at: https://inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be/erfgoedobjecten/3899 (Accessed: 23 May 2024).
Bulckens, K. (2017) The Ministry of Christ (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIII/2). London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller / Brepols
Lawrence, C. (1984) ‘The Iconology of Rubens’s Miraculous Draft of Fishes’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 14(1), pp. 24–35.
Martiny, V. G. (1962) ‘Étude historique et archéologique de l’église Notre-Dame au-delà de la Dyle à Malines’, Bulletin van de Koninklijke Commissie voor Monumenten en Landschappen, 13.