The most admired thing in Notre-Dame de la Chapelle is its passage from Romanesque to Gothic, and a good part of that passage was designed only in 1879 by a municipal official working from broken stones and a theory he had brought back from Paris.
Pierre-Victor Jamaer (1825 -1902) entered the Brussels city administration as a draughtsman in 1847, rose through the building inspectorate, and became architect to the City in 1864, which made him responsible for very nearly everything the municipality owned that was older than itself. In August 1866, the year the works at the Chapelle opened, he went to Paris and spent two or three days with Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814 – 1879), whose entry on restoration in the Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française [Analytical dictionary of French architecture] had appeared that same year, and whose doctrine held that a restorer’s task is to return a building to a complete condition which it may never have occupied at any single moment of its history. The formula licenses a great deal. Under it the restorer may finish what the medieval builders abandoned and remove what later centuries added, designing the missing parts in the medieval manner, on the reasoning that a building possesses an ideal form which its own history has obscured. Jamaer took this literally, with an archaeological rigour that even those who disliked the results conceded.
What he found at the Chapelle was a church mutilated in almost every century of its existence and repaired each time in whatever idiom happened to be to hand: a choir of 1250 to 1275; a transept raised in two campaigns some decades earlier; a fifteenth-century nave built after a fire whose date the sources still cannot agree on; a west tower abandoned in 1508; a slate Baroque spire of 1699 standing over what the French bombardment had left; a great west window walled up at the end of the seventeenth century; and a north transept portal in a condition that no longer told anybody very much. Between 1866 and 1890 he set about giving the fabric the coherence it had never possessed. The interior of the choir and its painted decoration were renewed from 1866 to 1869; from 1879 the portal and window of the north transept arm were rebuilt in the transitional style, the design extrapolated from fragments recovered in the façade itself; around 1886 the blocked west window was reopened (Bruxelles Urbanisme et Patrimoine, n.d.). The regional inventory calls the north front today the Romanesque-Gothic façade restituted by Jamaer, and the word is exact.
His reputation in Brussels was made and unmade on this method inside his own lifetime, and the most economical judgement is the contemporary one. Charles Buls, writing in 1875 and mayor of the city a few years later, recorded that Jamaer was renewing Sainte-Gudule, the Town Hall and the Chapelle, and that sharp criticism was following him as he did it. The least forgiving example stands on the Grand-Place. The old Broodhuis, itself a late Gothic building the sixteenth century had left unfinished, its gable, gallery and central tower never executed, had decayed past what Jamaer judged repairable, so he demolished it in 1874 and rebuilt it between 1873 and 1895 as the Maison du Roi, on Viollet-le-Duc’s principle of unity of style, completing in neo-Gothic the tower and gallery no medieval mason had raised (Paulus, 1980). At the Town Hall he worked with the city archivist Alphonse Wauters on the iconographic programme for the façade statuary, established that the existing niches were too shallow to hold figures and had them deepened, and set going a campaign that ran for some sixty years and produced two hundred and ninety-four statues of Brabantine and Brussels worthies for a state that had needed a medieval pantheon since 1830 (Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, 2011). A city architect and a city archivist invented a communal past between them and had it cut in stone. The same two offices did the same work at the Sablon between 1917 and 1937, where François Malfait (1872 – 1955) and Guillaume Des Marez (1870 –1931) filled the empty niches there with fifty-seven figures to a programme drawn from the church at Brou.
The temptation to make Jamaer a vandal and the building his victim should be resisted, since the church he inherited had never been the thing he is accused of spoiling. It is not an orderly evolution from Romanesque solidity through Gothic verticality to Baroque refinement, whatever the guidebooks say, and it never was. It is a sequence of ruptures, each closed off in the style, and with the money, available at the moment the roof next needed replacing. The nave burned and was rebuilt tall and light, its aisles begun in 1436 and finished for the consecration of 1483 by the bishop of Cambrai. The tower stopped in 1508 for want of funds and stood truncated for nearly two centuries. Calvinists destroyed the furnishings in 1574. Villeroy’s guns wrecked the tower in August 1695, and the parish, shelled and suddenly generous, finished it in 1699 with the slate spire of Antoine Pastorana (1640 – 1702), which is more accurately understood as the completion of an unfinished Gothic tower by the only means then available to the men doing the work than as a Baroque flourish chosen for its own sake. Jamaer belongs inside that sequence. He was the nineteenth century’s contribution to a building every century had already rewritten, and what distinguishes his contribution from the others is that he came equipped with a theory, which meant the seams he closed were closed invisibly, on the strength of an argument about what the church had always been trying to be.
The choir defeats this argument, or comes close to it. Built over a quarter of a century with a French-derived elevation, paid for by a wealthy Benedictine priory of the Holy Sepulchre of Cambrai that had held the site since Godfrey I, Count of Louvain (c.1060 – 1139), granted it a chapel outside the walls in 1134, and carried through against the objections of the chapter of Saints Michael and Gudula, who saw exactly what an independent parish in a growing suburb would cost them in offerings, it is a coherent work of a single ambition and probably the finest thirteenth-century architecture surviving in Brussels. Continuous money and a corporation with something to prove will produce a choir of that quality, and the Chapelle has rarely enjoyed either for long enough to repeat the achievement.
Why a young Belgium thought this parish worth so much theory and stone becomes clear from the floor of the church, and from a transaction that took place there in 1765. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525/1530 – 1569) married Mayken Coecke van Aelst in the Chapelle in 1563 and was buried in it six years later, and around 1612 to 1614 his son Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568 – 1625) commissioned Peter Paul Rubens (1577 – 1640) to paint Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter, his father’s name saint, for the memorial stone of his parents. In 1765 the church council sold that painting to the collector Gerrit Braamcamp for five thousand guilders, requiring only that the buyer pay for a copy to hang in its place; the original now hangs in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and the copy is what one sees above the grave (Bruxelles Urbanisme et Patrimoine, n.d.). A parish that sold a Rubens off the tomb of the greatest painter in its register, and accepted a substitute, had been in the business of dignified replacement for a hundred years before Jamaer arrived with a theory to justify it. François Anneessens (1660 – 1719), dean of the guilds, beheaded on the Grand-Place for defending communal privilege against Austrian centralisation, lies here too, and the nineteenth century put him to vigorous use as a martyr of Belgian liberty. A church in the Marolles holding the painter of the Netherlandish peasantry and the executed defender of civic privilege was never going to be handled as an ordinary building by the generation assembling a country out of its medieval remains, and Jamaer, who had the niches at the Town Hall deepened so the statues of the fatherland would fit, knew exactly what he had been asked to supply. The interruptions in this church are the honest part of it, and they are also the part that every subsequent hand, his most systematically, has worked to smooth away.
References
Bruxelles Urbanisme et Patrimoine (n.d.) ‘Eglise paroissiale Notre-Dame de la Chapelle’ [Parish church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle], Inventaire du patrimoine architectural [Inventory of the architectural heritage]. Brussels: Région de Bruxelles-Capitale. Available at: https://monument.heritage.brussels/fr/Bruxelles_Pentagone/Place_de_la_Chapelle/A001/30933 (Accessed: 5 March 2025).
Despy-Meyer, A. and Despy, G. (1964) ‘Prévôté de Notre-Dame de la Chapelle à Bruxelles’ [The priory of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle in Brussels], in Monasticon Belge, vol. 4: Province de Brabant. Liège: Centre national de recherches d’histoire religieuse
Paulus, G. (1980) ‘La restauration de la Maison du Roi (1873–1895) à la Grand-Place de Bruxelles, par l’architecte Pierre Victor Jamaer (1825–1902)’ [The restoration of the Maison du Roi (1873–1895) on the Grand-Place in Brussels, by the architect Pierre Victor Jamaer], Bulletin de la Commission royale des monuments et des sites, 9.
Région de Bruxelles-Capitale (2011) Restauration(s) et conservation [Restoration(s) and conservation], Journées du Patrimoine. Brussels: urban.brussels.
Viollet-le-Duc, E.-E. (1866) ‘Restauration’ [Restoration], in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle [Analytical dictionary of French architecture from the eleventh to the sixteenth century], vol. 8. Paris: Bance-Morel