The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels has a rich history rooted in its establishment in the 11th century on the foundations of an earlier Romanesque church. Construction of the current structure began in 1226 under the direction of Duke Henry II of Brabant and continued for 300 years, culminating in the early 16th century. Vertical lines and restrained decorations characterise its Brabantian Gothic style. The western façade features two towers and three portals without a rose window. The towers, probably designed by Jan Van Ruysbroeck (1470-1485), remain unfinished but showcase the intended verticality and intricate openwork.
The cathedral’s nave, supported by cylindrical columns with cabbage leaf capitals, houses 12 statues of apostles. Created in the 17th century by sculptors Luc Fayd’herbe (1617-1697), Jérôme Duquesnoy the Younger (1602-1654), Johannes van Mildert (1588-1638), and Tobias de Lelis (1641-1660), these statues replaced those destroyed during the Calvinist iconoclasm of 1566.
The 17th-century Baroque pulpit by Hendrik Frans Verbrugghen (1654-1724) stands out within the cathedral. Its base depicts Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, while the Virgin and Child at the top symbolise redemption. The cathedral also features 16 side chapels with 19th-century stained glass windows by Jean-Baptiste Capronnier, some of which tell the story of the church’s patroness, St. Gudula.
St. Gudula, a 7th-century saint, is a patron saint of Brussels alongside St. Michael. Born into a saintly family in the 8th century, her mother was St. Amalaberga, her brother St. Emenbert, her sisters St. Pharaildis and St. Rainelda, and her aunt was St. Gertrude. As the daughter of the Duke of Lotharingia, St. Gudula promoted Christianity during her lifetime. In art, she is typically depicted as a young woman holding a lantern, symbolising her role in bringing light to the darkness.
The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in BrusselsThe Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels Michiel Coxie (c.1499 – 1592?) , The Crucifixion, oil on oak, : 280 x 355 cm, the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in BrusselsThe Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in BrusselsThe Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels
Norwich Cathedral possesses one of the largest surviving ensembles of Gothic roof bosses in Europe, an exceptional corpus of medieval sculpture both in scale and in preservation. Dating largely from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the bosses number over one thousand and display a striking breadth of subject matter. Biblical narratives, Christological cycles, saints’ lives and allegorical themes are set alongside images drawn from bestiaries, folklore and scenes of everyday life, creating a visual register that combines sacred instruction with secular wit. Their survival is particularly remarkable in light of the waves of destruction that swept through English churches: the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the mid-seventeenth-century Puritan iconoclasm claimed countless examples of medieval imagery, yet the bosses of Norwich endured with comparatively little loss. Collectively they form not merely an ornamental ceiling scheme but a unique visual archive of late medieval thought, devotional practice and imaginative culture, offering scholars an invaluable witness to the interplay of sacred and secular traditions in the later Middle Ages.
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.
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.
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.
St Janskerk, Sint-Janskerkhof 1, MechelenSt Janskerk, Sint-Janskerkhof 1, MechelenPaul Rubens (1577–1640), The Adoration of the Magi, 1617, StJanskerk, Sint-Janskerkhof 1, MechelenPaul Rubens (1577–1640), The Adoration of the Magi, 1617, StJanskerk, Sint-Janskerkhof 1, Mechelen
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.)
Sint-Katelijnekerk is a distinctive small Gothic church featuring an enormous late Baroque pulpit, providing an intriguing contrast between Brabantian Gothic and late Baroque styles. The church’s basic layout includes a three-aisle cross nave with a square crossing tower, reflecting its medieval origins. Significant remodelling occurred between 1400 and 1450, followed by the addition of the Fontes Chapel in the 16th century and St. Joseph’s Chapel in 1673. Despite being located in a poorer part of the city, the church accumulated many artworks over the centuries, especially in its chapels.
One of the church’s most captivating features is the grand pulpit crafted by Pieter Valckx (1734-1783) in 1774. Depicting ‘The Holy Family hiding in the ruins of the temple,’ this piece, designed by his teacher Theodoor Verhaegen (1700-1759), remains a focal point of the interior. Though many Baroque elements were removed during an extensive 19th-century restoration, the pulpit is a testament to the church’s layered history.
This restoration sought to return the church to its original Brabantian Gothic purity, stripping away many of the Baroque additions. Yet, the massive pulpit remains, bridging the gap between two architectural eras and defining the church’s unique interior.
The current building of the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp began construction in 1352 and was completed only in 1521, taking nearly 170 years to finish. This extended construction period led to a fusion of architectural styles.
Master builders Jan Appelmans (1352–1430), Pieter Appelmans (1373–1445), and Rombout II Keldermans (1460–1531) were instrumental in shaping the cathedral’s distinctive design. The octagonal part of the tower, designed by Herman de Waghemakere, was built in 1507. The tower was finally complete in 1518 when his son Damien de Waghemakere realised its magnificent spire.
Constructed from natural stone, the Cathedral features a high northern tower with spire-like stone lacework tracery, a lower southern tower, an octagonal lantern with an onion-shaped top, seven aisles, and multiple chapels. The exceptionally wide sash arches between the nave and side aisles further enhance the sense of openness within the interior. Notably, the traditional triforium is omitted and replaced by a decorative strip of meshwork above the arches, emphasising verticality and lightness.
The cathedral’s interior serves as a dynamic gallery of the city’s artistic heritage. Significant works include masterpieces by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640): ‘The Raising of the Cross’ (1609–1610), ‘Descent from the Cross’ (1611–1614), ‘Triptych with the Resurrection of Christ’ (1611–1612), and ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ (1625–1626). Other important artworks include ‘The Assumption of the Virgin’ by Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), as well as contributions from Jacob de Backer (c. 1555–1585), Otto van Veen (1556–1629), Maerten de Vos (1532–1603), Hendrick van Balen I (1575–1632), Cornelis Schut I (1597–1655), and Artus Quellinus II (1625–1700).
The Cathedral of Our Lady in AntwerpThe Cathedral of Our Lady in AntwerpThe Cathedral of Our Lady in AntwerpThe Cathedral of Our Lady in AntwerpThe Cathedral of Our Lady in AntwerpThe Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp
The cathedral is dedicated to St Rumbold of Mechelen, a Celtic missionary whose relics are believed to rest within the building. It is a three-aisled cruciform church whose construction began in the 13th century and which was consecrated in 1312. Around 1335, a new campaign of enlargement was undertaken, introducing the choir with its seven radiating chapels. This design is possibly attributable to Jean d’Oisy (1310–1377), the influential master builder credited with adapting the French Rayonnant style to the Low Countries and shaping what became known as Brabantian Gothic. In St Rumbold’s, this phase established a spacious ambulatory with pointed arches and slender piers opening gracefully onto the choir, while the refined window tracery reflected the emerging geometrical precision of the style. The arrangement enhanced liturgical processions and demonstrated Mechelen’s growing prestige, for major ecclesiastical projects in the fourteenth century often served as both religious and civic statements. The vault of the choir, however, was not completed until 1451.
The construction of the monumental tower began in the 1450s under the direction of the Keldermans family, one of the most distinguished dynasties of architects in the Low Countries and central to the development of Brabantian Gothic. Jan II Keldermans provided the initial design, followed by the supervision of his son Andries I Keldermans (1400–1488). Substantial contributions were also made by Antoon I Keldermans (c.1440–1512), Antoon II Keldermans (d.1515), Rombout II Keldermans (c.1460–1531) and Laurens II Keldermans (d.1534). Their work gave the tower its ambitious verticality, intended to reach over 160 metres but left incomplete in height. In 1559, Sint-Romboutskerk was elevated to cathedral status, reflecting the city’s ecclesiastical importance.
The cathedral endured considerable damage during the religious and political upheavals of the late sixteenth century. In 1580, during the English Fury, it suffered serious losses, and in the Calvinist period between 1580 and 1585 it was used for Protestant worship, during which much of its art was destroyed or dispersed. The Catholic restoration after 1585 initiated a programme of redecoration that transformed the Gothic interior with new furnishings and altarpieces. Key to this renewal was the contribution of Michiel Coxcie (1497/1501–1585), known as the ‘Flemish Raphael’ for his Italianate compositions inspired by Raphael’s harmony and colour. Several of Coxcie’s final works, created in the 1580s, replaced altarpieces lost during the iconoclastic years, restoring both the visual richness and the devotional function of the cathedral.
Among the cathedral’s later treasures is the high altar designed by Lucas Faydherbe (1617–1697) in 1665, a masterwork of sculptural and architectural integration. The collection also includes Anthony van Dyck’s (1599–1641) ‘Christ on the Cross’ and paintings by other leading Flemish Baroque masters, underscoring the cathedral’s dual identity as a major Gothic monument and a repository of seventeenth-century religious art.
The builders of the great cathedrals of medieval Europe rarely lived to see the completion of their work. These vast projects were always conceived as undertakings that would stretch across generations, so that the act of building was understood as both practical and spiritual. Constructing a cathedral was never simply a technical task: it shaped the local economy, employed many crafts and trades, and gave visible form to the devotion of whole communities. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the temple is never just a structure of stone. It is a centre of worship, a bond that holds a community together, and a commitment renewed through time. In this sense, a temple is never truly finished. It grows with the people it serves, reflecting both their continuity and their change. The words of Psalm 127:1, ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain,’ express this belief, reminding us that the truest temple is first raised in the hearts of the faithful, even while it takes form in stone.
Salisbury Cathedral, one of the masterpieces of English Gothic architecture, shows this principle clearly. Begun in the early thirteenth century and completed more than seven hundred years ago, it has absorbed many additions and alterations that mark the passing of time and the changing needs of worship. The great spire that dominates the building, the reshaping of its interior for new liturgical practice, and the ongoing conservation work all bear witness to the life of the community it serves. Saint Augustine’s words, ‘We are the times: such as we are, such are the times,’ are especially fitting here. They remind us that the cathedral is not only an ancient landmark but also a living sign of faith and continuity, sustained by the collective spirit of generations.
King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, begun under Henry VI (1421–1471) in 1446 and completed in 1547 under Henry VIII (1491–1547), is both a masterpiece of late Perpendicular Gothic and one of the most eloquent monuments of dynastic propaganda in England. Rising during the turbulence of the Wars of the Roses, halted and resumed under successive monarchs, and finally finished by the Tudors, the chapel embodies the intersection of religion, politics, and art in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England.
Its fabric proclaims continuity across disruption. Henry VI conceived the chapel as the centrepiece of his new foundation, but after his deposition the works stalled. Only with Henry VII (1457–1509) did construction recover momentum, for the Tudor monarch recognised in this vast, unfinished structure a ready-made canvas upon which to project legitimacy. Through financial endowment and a carefully directed decorative programme, Henry VII and Henry VIII transformed the chapel into a dynastic monument. The architecture itself, with its immense proportions and the world’s largest fan vault, was a statement of authority, while its iconography embedded the Tudor myth of providential rule.
The heraldic scheme remains omnipresent: the crowned Tudor rose, the Beaufort portcullis, the Richmond greyhound, and the Tudor dragon are repeated with almost obsessive regularity. These devices proclaimed the dynasty’s roots in both Yorkist and Lancastrian lines, asserted its descent through Margaret Beaufort, and advertised the stability restored after decades of civil war. Yet heraldry was only one register of meaning.
The chapel’s stained glass, executed between 1515 and 1531, constitutes one of the most ambitious cycles of its age. Each window is organised around paired typologies: Old Testament scenes are juxtaposed with New Testament fulfilments. This exegetical method—reading Hebrew scripture as foreshadowing Christian truth—was conventional in late medieval theology but here acquires a new political charge. Scenes from Genesis, Exodus, and the Prophets are paired with episodes from the life of Christ, presenting salvation history as a continuous, divinely ordered plan.
Within this framework, royal heraldry is interwoven. Margins and tracery lights carry Tudor roses, portcullises, and royal arms, binding the dynasty into the same providential scheme. In effect, just as the Old Testament was fulfilled in the New, so the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses found resolution in the Tudor settlement. The dynasty presented itself as the vessel chosen to bring divine order to a fractured kingdom.
This fusion of scripture and politics is sharpened by the historical context of their completion. The glass was installed under Henry VIII, during the years in which the king’s marital and dynastic anxieties intensified. It is not accidental that windows emphasise genealogies and divine sanction, reinforcing the message that Tudor succession was inscribed into sacred history itself. The visual pairing of prophecy and fulfilment thus doubled as a legitimising allegory for the monarchy.
By the time of its consecration, King’s College Chapel had become something more than the original pious foundation of Henry VI. It was a dynastic theatre in glass and stone, its fan vault and stained cycles announcing both the magnificence of the English monarchy and the providential inevitability of Tudor rule. It remains, even now, one of the most potent survivals of how late medieval and Renaissance art could bind together religion, politics, and propaganda in a single architectural vision.
