Sint-Niklaaskerk in Ghent is one of the finest examples of Scaldian Gothic architecture, a distinct regional style that predates Brabantine Gothic. Emerging in the Scheldt River basin, particularly in Ghent, Tournai, and Oudenaarde, during the 12th and 13th centuries, it emphasises solidity, compactness, and structural clarity over the extreme verticality and refined ornamentation that would later define Brabantine Gothic in the 14th and 15th centuries in many churches of Brussels, Leuven, Mechelen, and Antwerp.
Sint-Niklaaskerk, Ghent
Built between 1200 and 1250, the church is distinguished by its dark blue-grey Tournai limestone, a heavy, durable material that gives it a sombre, fortress-like appearance. This contrasts with Brabantine Gothic, which favoured lighter sandstone, allowing for intricate tracery and delicate façades. The most defining feature of Sint-Niklaaskerk is its central crossing tower, a hallmark of Scaldian Gothic. It is squat and powerful and dominates the skyline without the soaring height of later Brabantine designs, which relied on flying buttresses for structural support.
The austere façade has tall, narrow lancet windows and minimal sculptural decoration. It reinforces its sturdy Romanesque heritage that, in the 13th century, began transforming into lighter Gothic development using different engineering solutions. Clustered columns with robust capitals lead the eye toward the ribbed vaults, creating a sense of height without sacrificing the building’s weighty presence. The restrained ornamentation—simple tracery and modest sculptural details—reflects the transitional nature of the church, preserving Romanesque solidity while embracing early Gothic verticality.
Sint Baafskathedraal (Saint Bavo’s Cathedral ) in Ghent, one of Europe’s most beatiful Gothic cathedrals, evolved over centuries through multiple construction phases. Built on the site of a 12th-century Romanesque church, of which only the crypt with medieval frescoes remains, the cathedral’s transformation incorporated many influences and changing architectural styles. Its unusual reddish hue comes from a mix of materials: early Romanesque sections in Tournai limestone and later Gothic expansions using red bricks, especially in the nave and tower.
Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent
The first construction phase in the early 14th century replaced the Romanesque choir with a Gothic structure combining northern French Gothic verticality, pointed arches, and large stained-glass windows with Scaldian Gothic style elements, including Tournai limestone. The choir corridor and radiating chapels, added in the early 15th century, allowed for more altars and devotional spaces.
The second phase (1462–1538) saw the construction of the 89-meter-high western tower, a Brabantine Gothic structure with sand-lime bricks from Dilbeek. The tower consists of four diminishing floors, enhancing its verticality, and is crowned with four large pinnacles.
The third phase, beginning in 1533, replaced the nave, maintaining Gothic verticality and light while incorporating early Renaissance influences. The ribbed vaults distribute the ceiling’s weight across slender columns, while pointed arches frame the vast stained-glass windows, allowing multicoloured light to flood the space. Flying buttresses support thinner walls, a key Gothic innovation.
Later additions include Renaissance, Baroque, and Classicist elements. The Baroque high altar, made of white, black, and red-veined marble, reflects Counter-Reformation aesthetics. From 1741 to 1745, Laurent Delvaux created the Rococo pulpit.
Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in GhentSaint Bavo’s Cathedral in GhentSaint Bavo’s Cathedral in GhentSaint Bavo’s Cathedral in GhentSaint Bavo’s Cathedral in GhentSaint Bavo’s Cathedral in GhentSaint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent
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.
Notre Dame de la Chapelle, Brussels.Notre Dame de la Chapelle, Brussels.Notre Dame de la Chapelle, Brussels.
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
In the Middle Ages, pilgrimage was central to Christian devotion, symbolising penance, exile, and the search for divine grace. Major pilgrimage routes led to Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and Jerusalem, with countless local shrines drawing believers seeking miracles and spiritual renewal. The Collegiate Church of St. Peter and St. Guido in Anderlecht, Brussels, became one such site, attracting pilgrims due to the cult of St. Guido (c. 950–1012). A sacristan who renounced wealth for a wandering pilgrimage to Rome and the Holy Land, Guido embodied the peregrinatio religiosa, travelling in poverty and devotion. His tomb, linked to miracles, shaped Anderlecht’s religious identity and solidified the church’s role in medieval pilgrimage networks.
The Collegiate Church of St. Peter and St. Guido in Anderlecht, Brussels
The church is a prime example of Brabantine Gothic architecture. Brabantine Gothic is characterised by a more subdued decorative approach, tall clerestory windows, pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and intricate tracery, all creating an impression of height and lightness. Constructed between the 14th and 16th centuries, the church’s foundation includes an 11th-century Romanesque crypt, preserving the site’s early religious significance. Construction involved several architects, with Gillis Joos and Hendrik de Mol overseeing early phases in the mid-15th century. From 1479 to 1485, Jan van Ruysbroeck (c. 1400–1485), best known for his work on Brussels’ Town Hall tower, led the design of the choir. The project was continued by Jan and Hendrik van Evergem after 1485, while Louis van Bodeghem (c. 1470–1540) designed the elaborate Gothic portal. Matthijs III Keldermans (c. 1505–1580) expanded the tower and added side chapels from 1517.
The tower, expanded by Keldermans, integrates stepped buttresses and decorative pinnacles, blending structural stability with aesthetic grace. The portal by Bodeghem features delicate sculptural details and ornamental tracery, which are characteristic of Brabantine craftsmanship. Constructed primarily of Avesnes stone from northern France and Dilbeek stone from Brabant, the church’s pale limestone façade enhances its luminous quality, a hallmark of Brabantine Gothic.
The Collegiate Church of St. Peter and St. Guido in Anderlecht, BrusselsThe Collegiate Church of St. Peter and St. Guido in Anderlecht, Brussels
The tomb of King Ladislaus of Durazzo (1377–1414), San Giovanni a Carbonara, Naples
The tomb of King Ladislaus of Durazzo (1377–1414) rises to a height of some eighteen metres inside the Augustinian church of San Giovanni a Carbonara in Naples, dwarfing every other monument in the building and most funerary sculpture anywhere in the Italian peninsula.
The church occupies a site once used for the collection and burning of the city’s refuse, outside the eastern walls of medieval Naples, from which the name carbonara derives. Founded by the Augustinian friars in 1343 on land donated by the Neapolitan patrician Gualtiero Galeota, the church was enlarged and redecorated under the patronage of Ladislaus, who intended it as a dynastic pantheon for the last Angevin rulers of Naples. The monument was commissioned after his death by his sister and successor, Queen Joanna II of Naples (1373–1435), and is generally dated to between approximately 1414 and 1428. It is attributed to the sculptor Andrea Ciccione, also recorded as Andrea da Firenze, Andrea Guardi, and Andrea di Francesco da Firenze (c. 1388–1455), though his identity remains a matter of some scholarly uncertainty. What can be said with confidence is that Ciccione, if he is indeed the principal author, also executed the nearby tomb of Sergianni Caracciolo in the same church, the murdered lover of Joanna II, who was stabbed to death in the Castel Capuano in 1432 on the queen’s own orders.
The monument’s structure ascends through several registers in a manner that blends late Gothic verticality with the figurative language of the early Quattrocento. Its formal conception appears to derive from the earlier tomb of Robert of Anjou in Santa Chiara (c. 1343–1345), which similarly functioned as both altarpiece and dynastic screen, though the Ladislaus monument introduces significant innovations. The lowest tier presents caryatid figures of the Virtues, among them Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, Prudence, and Magnanimity, each carefully chosen to frame Ladislaus as an ideal Christian sovereign. Above them, a central arch shows Ladislaus and Joanna II enthroned side by side, a detail that speaks as much to Joanna’s own need for dynastic legitimation as to her brother’s posthumous glory. Higher still, the king’s reclining effigy is presented with hands folded in prayer, and at the apex an equestrian statue depicts him armed and in full chivalric regalia. An inscription on this figure names him ‘Divus Ladislaus,’ a classicising epithet that aligns the monument’s rhetoric with the emerging humanist culture of fifteenth-century Naples, drawing on the language of Roman triumphal arches such as Trajan’s Arch at Benevento. The uppermost register is crowned by a figure of the Virgin Mary, completing a theological programme that moves from earthly power to divine intercession. Whether any of this persuaded contemporary viewers of the king’s piety is another question; Ladislaus was feared as much as admired, and his reputation in life rested more on military aggression than spiritual devotion.
Ladislaus belonged to the Durazzo branch of the Capetian house of Anjou, a dynasty whose hold on southern Italy had been secured by Charles I of Anjou (1226–1285), brother of Louis IX of France, who seized the Kingdom of Sicily in 1266 with papal backing and Hohenstaufen blood on his hands. After the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, the Angevins lost the island of Sicily to the Crown of Aragon, and the rump kingdom, centred on Naples, became their principal domain. Ladislaus’s father, Charles III of Naples (1345–1386), briefly extended the family’s reach by claiming the throne of Hungary, ousting Louis I’s daughter Mary in December 1385. He was crowned at Székesfehérvár, but the triumph was short-lived: Elizabeth of Bosnia, mother of the deposed queen, arranged his assassination in February 1386, and he died of his wounds at Visegrád. The nine-year-old Ladislaus inherited the Neapolitan throne into a kingdom fractured by baronial rebellion, papal hostility (Urban VI refused to recognise him and called a crusade against him in 1387), and the competing claims of Louis II of Anjou, backed by the Avignon papacy during the Western Schism. For a time, his mother Margaret of Durazzo controlled little more than Naples and its immediate surroundings; when unrest broke out in the city, she and the young king fled to the fortress at Gaeta.
Much of Ladislaus’s reign was consumed by these entanglements. Recognition by Boniface IX in 1389 gave him papal legitimacy, and by 1400 he had recovered Naples from the Angevin faction. He married strategically, first to a wealthy Sicilian heiress whose dowry he spent on his military campaigns (and whom he subsequently divorced with papal consent), and then, in 1401, to Mary of Lusignan, daughter of the King of Cyprus. He fought to expel his Angevin rivals, exploited the papal schism to his advantage, and launched repeated campaigns into central Italy, twice occupying Rome, in 1408 and again in 1413. At the height of his power he controlled significant territory in the Papal States, and contemporary observers noted the ruthlessness with which he pursued his ambitions; later tradition would cast him as a model for Machiavelli’s Prince. His death on 6 August 1414, at the age of thirty-seven, cut these campaigns short. The cause remains disputed: some contemporaries suspected poisoning, possibly at the hands of a woman with whom he was intimate, while later tradition attributed his decline to syphilis.
Joanna II, who succeeded him, inherited a kingdom already beginning to unravel. Her reign was marked by factional struggles, shifting alliances with both Aragon and the Angevin claimants of Provence, and the absence of a direct heir. When she died in 1435, the Durazzo line died with her, and the contested succession that followed ultimately delivered Naples into Aragonese hands under Alfonso V. The tomb in San Giovanni a Carbonara, then, commemorates not a dynasty at its zenith but one at its point of extinction, a fact that lends the monument’s triumphalism a certain retrospective irony.
That the monument survives at all is remarkable: Allied bombing in July 1943 tore open the nave roof and badly damaged the church, yet the tomb came through largely intact. The tomb of Robert of Anjou in Santa Chiara, the earlier royal mausoleum on which the Ladislaus monument was directly modelled, was less fortunate, suffering partial destruction in the same campaign. What remains in San Giovanni a Carbonara is therefore the fullest surviving statement of Angevin funerary ambition in Naples.
References
Bruzelius, C. (2004) The Stones of Naples: Church Building in Angevin Italy, 1266–1343. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
De Divitiis, B. (ed.) A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (1350–1600). The Renaissance Society of America,. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Dunbabin, J. (1998) Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-Century Europe. London: Longman
San Donato Church in Genoa is an exceptional example of 12th-century Ligurian Romanesque architecture. The façade, built from local limestone, is marked by a black-and-white banded portal and an architrave re-used from a Roman structure, a detail that underscores the continuity between the city’s classical past and its medieval present. Although the church has undergone several reconstructions, its original character has been preserved through the careful incorporation of surviving medieval fabric. The destruction of later additions during the Second World War left the core Romanesque structure largely intact, allowing its early form to be read with unusual clarity.
One of its most distinctive features is the octagonal bell tower, or nolar tower, integrated directly into the body of the church—an arrangement rare in Genoa. The tower is enriched with sawtooth friezes and a triple register of bifore and trifore windows, lending vertical rhythm to its mass. Within, the church follows a basilican plan with three naves, each ending in its own apse. The arcades are supported by twelve columns, six of them monolithic shafts of Roman origin reused from the earlier building, while the others, fashioned in alternating black and white stone and capped with Romanesque capitals, belong to later phases of construction, particularly those dating to the closing decades of the twelfth century. The pillars that uphold the tiburio also belong to the earliest fabric, providing a structural link to the building’s first phase.
Among the works preserved within is the Madonna del Latte by Barnaba da Modena, painted in the fourteenth century. Barnaba (c. 1328–1386) was among the leading figures of the early Genoese school, his style blending Lombard, Tuscan, and Byzantine influences. His impact endured well into the fifteenth century, shaping the work of local painters and securing his place in the city’s artistic lineage.
Chiesa di San Donato (Church of Saint Donatus), Genoa.Chiesa di San Donato (Church of Saint Donatus), GenoaChiesa di San Donato (Church of Saint Donatus), GenoaChiesa di San Donato (Church of Saint Donatus), Genoa
References
Whitfield, P. (2020) Historic Churches of Genoa: A Brief Guide. Genoa: Peter Whitfield
The Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral (formerly part of Christ Church monastery) was built between 1304 and 1397. Originally a meeting place for monks to discuss monastery business, it features an impressive wooden waggon vault roof from 1397 and magnificent medieval stained glass windows. The structure also includes a double stone seat along its walls and the Prior’s throne. After the Reformation, it was used for Puritan sermons and heresy trials. Despite falling into disrepair by 1845, it was restored by 1897, maintaining its medieval architectural splendour.
The Chapter House of Canterbury CathedralThe Chapter House of Canterbury CathedralThe Chapter House of Canterbury CathedralThe Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral
The vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury Cathedral
The vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury CathedralThe vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury CathedralThe vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury CathedralThe vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury CathedralThe vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury CathedralThe vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury CathedralThe vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury CathedralThe vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury CathedralThe vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury CathedralThe vault of the Great Cloister Garth (rebuilt 1394-1414) at Canterbury Cathedral
Canterbury Cathedral, The Old Palace, The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EECanterbury Cathedral, The Old Palace, The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EECanterbury Cathedral, The Old Palace, The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EECanterbury Cathedral, The Old Palace, The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EECanterbury Cathedral, The Old Palace, The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EECanterbury Cathedral, The Old Palace, The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EECanterbury Cathedral, The Old Palace, The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EECanterbury Cathedral, The Old Palace, The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EECanterbury Cathedral, The Old Palace, The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EE
The exterior niches of Notre-Dame du Sablon stood empty for centuries. They were filled between 1917 and 1937, under the direction of the city architect François Malfait (1872 – 1955), with fifty-seven figures carved by twenty-seven sculptors, to an iconographic programme drawn up by Guillaume Des Marez (1870–1931), archivist of the city of Brussels, who took his model largely from the church at Brou in Bourg-en-Bresse, built for Margaret of Austria by Lodewijk van Bodeghem (1470 – 1540) (Boelens-Sintzoff and Walazyc, 2001). Military guilds, ecclesiastical founders, princely protectors, benefactors, allegories, saints: an entire late medieval society, designed by a professional historian and cut in stone during and after a German occupation. The niches were empty and Brussels needed them full. That impulse is older than the interwar period and it explains a great deal about this building, which has been asked to speak for somebody in almost every century of its existence.
The statuary was the last act of a long campaign. Auguste Schoy (1838-1885) began restoring the church in 1870, and his first scheme was refused by the Royal Commission for Monuments as excessively historicising, which confined him to modest work. His successors were less constrained. Jules-Jacques van Ysendyck (1836-1901) took the site from 1890, his son Maurice (1868- 1941) continuing after him, both working on the unity of style inherited from Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814 – 1879), and it is their work that produced the balustrades, pinnacles and tracery a visitor now reads as fifteenth-century (Boelens-Sintzoff and Walazyc, 2001). The setting was rearranged to suit. When the Rue de la Régence was driven towards the Place Poelaert from 1872, the houses that had leaned against the church since the 1760s came down, and Frieda Van Tyghem’s judgement on that fashion applies here: Saint Peter at Leuven and the Sablon were left as monuments served up on a saucer, deprived of the small buildings that had given them scale, elderly giants who are not permitted to die (Van Tyghem, 1980). A state was building itself an impressive past that could be photographed.
What, then, is fifteenth-century here, and in what sense is it Brabantine? The fabric is Balegem sandstone. The plan is a cross-basilica of five aisles, the central vessel flanked by side aisles of unequal width to north and south. The arcade mouldings run into the shafts of the piers and die there without capitals, so that the shafts rise unbroken into the vault ribs, and the choir extends two bays into a seven-sided apse lit by eleven lancets of some fourteen metres. Suppressing the capital is the local late Gothic simplification, shared with Saint Sulpitius at Diest and, in another form, with Antwerp cathedral (Van Tyghem, 1980). So far the church answers to its label. The choir, however, has neither ambulatory nor wreath of radiating chapels, and the great Brabantine churches consistently have both, following the French cathedral model (Van Tyghem, 1980; De Jonge, Geleyns and Hörsch, 2009). The Sablon is Brabantine in its stone and its mouldings and not in its plan, which is a strange thing to have to say about a building routinely presented as the purest example of the style.
The strangeness eases once one asks where the style came from as a category. Domien Roggen and J. Withof gave Belgian scholarship its founders and grand masters of Brabantine Gothic in 1944, a year in which the question of what belonged to Belgium was not academic. Thomas Coomans has since asked in his title whether the subject is Brabantine Gothic or simply Gothic in Brabant, and his status quaestionis is unsparing: the coherence of the school is far less secure than the handbooks assume, the definition rests heavily on building stone and a handful of decorative markers, and the construct owes a great deal to the historiographical needs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Coomans, 2003). Schoy and the Van Ysendycks were working inside that category while it still looked solid, and they wrote it back into the fabric. A church that departs from the Brabantine plan was corrected, in its ornament and its outline, into an exemplar of the school it only partly follows. The restorers were not deceiving anyone. They were doing what the definition of the period told them the building had always meant to be.
The medieval church beneath all this is thinly documented, since the archive of the Great Crossbowmen’s Guild, who built it, has not survived. A chapel granted to the guild in 1304 preceded it; the present building was begun around 1400; the choir stood by 1435, dated by wall paintings given by a member of the Clutinc lineage, uncovered under whitewash in 1859 or 1860 depending on the account; the north transept followed by about 1450; work stopped, resumed towards the end of the century, and the sacrarium behind the choir carries the date 1549. The tower planned above the western bays was never raised, for want of money. The halt is conventionally attributed to the disorder that followed the death of Charles the Bold (1433-1477), when the male line of the Valois dukes of Burgundy became extinct. The dating fits, though with the guild’s accounts lost the connection is inferred rather than demonstrated.
The money came from the cult rather than the fabric, and the cult was itself a political instrument from the beginning. The church owed its pilgrims to a small miraculous Virgin, said to have been taken from Antwerp in 1348 by a Brussels woman named Beatrijs Soetkens, acting on a vision, and rowed upriver to the crossbowmen’s chapel, which the guild repaid with the annual Ommegang. Soetkens is a figure of legend and has no dates. The story gave a militia guild a sanctuary of its own and gave Brussels a relic Antwerp had lost, which was worth more than either city admitted. Its fullest early telling is a Habsburg commission: the tapestry cycle of the Legend of Our Lady of the Sablon, designed by Bernard van Orley (c.1487/1491 – 1541) between 1516 and 1518 for the postmaster Frans van Taxis, who had himself woven in beside Maximilian I and Frederick III. The nobility followed the image. The Thurn und Taxis, hereditary postmasters to the Habsburgs, kept a house opposite the south portal and endowed the chapels of Saint Ursula (1651–76) and Saint Marcou (1690) flanking the choir, securing burial within sight of the statue (Minette d’Oulhaye, 1981). The statue was destroyed by Calvinists around 1581, when the church stood closed. A second origin story arrived afterwards, deriving the foundation from the Brabantine victory at Woeringen in 1288 and supplying the official title Notre-Dame des Victoires that the church still bears. The Ommegang lapsed and returned in 1930, for the centenary of Belgian independence, in the form of a pageant modelled on the procession staged for Charles V in 1549.
Every one of these interventions was made by people who needed the building to say something on their behalf, and most of them were made when saying it was urgent. A guild without an ancient title needed a miracle. A postmaster newly arrived in the Brabantine nobility needed his face in the story. A state founded in 1830 needed an architecture that was demonstrably its own and not French, and its restorers gave it one, in stone, at the Sablon and elsewhere. A city emerging from occupation needed its saints back in their niches, and an archivist wrote the programme. Historians of the last thirty years have been right to take the category apart, and Coomans is right that Brabantine Gothic is partly an invention of the people who named it. That does not make the church a fraud. It makes it a working building, in the fullest sense: a structure that has been continuously employed, by guilds and postmasters and archivists and governments, to say what a particular moment could not otherwise say aloud. The choir of 1435 remains the finest thing in it, and even the choir was somebody’s argument.
Notre-Dame du Sablon, Brussels Notre-Dame du Sablon, BrusselsNotre-Dame du Sablon, BrusselsNotre-Dame du Sablon, Brussels
References
Boelens-Sintzoff, F. and Walazyc, A.-S. (eds.) (2001) L’église Notre-Dame du Sablon [The church of Notre-Dame du Sablon]. Brussels: Ministère de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale
Bruxelles Urbanisme et Patrimoine (n.d.) ‘Eglise Notre-Dame des Victoires au Sablon’, Inventaire du patrimoine architectural [Inventory of the architectural heritage]. Brussels: Région de Bruxelles-Capitale. Available at: https://monument.heritage.brussels/fr/buildings/30493 (Accessed: 3 June 2024).
Coomans, T. (2003) ‘”Brabantse gotiek” of “Gotiek in Brabant”? Ontstaan van een architectuurschool, status quaestionis en onderzoeksperspectieven’ [‘Brabantine Gothic’ or ‘Gothic in Brabant’? The formation of an architectural school, status quaestionis and research perspectives], Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis, 86(3–4), pp. 241–271.
De Jonge, K., Geleyns, P. and Hörsch, M. (eds.) (2009) Gotiek in het hertogdom Brabant [Gothic in the Duchy of Brabant]. Leuven: Peeters
Des Marez, G. (1921) Traité d’architecture dans son application aux monuments de Bruxelles [Treatise on architecture applied to the monuments of Brussels]. Brussels, pp. 161–226.
Minette d’Oulhaye, L.T. (1981) ‘La chapelle sépulcrale de la famille de La Tour et Tassis dans le transept nord de l’église du Sablon à Bruxelles’ [The sepulchral chapel of the La Tour et Tassis family in the north transept of the Sablon church in Brussels], Folklore Brabançon, 232, pp. 365–412.
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Lodewijk van Bodeghem. RKDartists, record no. 437896. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/437896 (Accessed: 2 June 2024).
Roggen, D. and Withof, J. (1944) ‘Grondleggers en grootmeesters der Brabantsche gotiek’ [Founders and grand masters of Brabantine Gothic], Gentsche Bijdragen tot de Kunstgeschiedenis, pp. 83–209.
Thibaut de Maisières, M. (1942) Les églises gothiques de Bruxelles [The Gothic churches of Brussels]. Brussels, pp. 26–30, pl. XVII–XXXII.
Van Tyghem, F. (1980) ‘Gotisch bouwen in Brabant’ [Building Gothic in Brabant], Openbaar Kunstbezit Vlaanderen, pp. 123–162.
