The religious significance of Hanswijk in Mechelen dates to the 10th century. According to tradition, a ship carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary became stranded on the River Dijle and only moved forward once the statue was brought ashore. This led to the belief that Mary wished to be venerated there. A chapel dedicated to Saint Lambert and Saint Catherine was soon established, and by 1263, it was a recognised pilgrimage site.
Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk, Mechelen
The Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk, built between 1663 and 1681, was designed by Lucas Faydherbe (1617–1697), a Flemish architect and sculptor trained under Peter Paul Rubens. His work belongs to the Flemish Baroque tradition but reflects strong Italian influences. Unlike many Northern European Baroque architects, Faydherbe emphasised sculptural clarity and structural refinement, recalling Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and Francesco Borromini (1599–1667).
Faydherbe’s design introduced a centralised rotunda within a longitudinal nave, merging two architectural forms—an advanced structural solution for the Low Countries. The 34-metre dome required iron tie rods to support the lateral thrust, a technique disguised with stucco but reflecting sophisticated engineering principles.
While rooted in Flemish Baroque, the basilica incorporates Italian styles, particularly its rotunda design, inspired by Roman churches. This was unusual in the Low Countries, where longitudinal plans were dominant. Faydherbe’s understanding of dome construction is evident in the building’s weight distribution solutions.
Inside, the relief arches above the rotunda, depicting Christ’s fall under the cross and the adoration of the shepherds, reflect Southern European decorative styles. The sculptural program reinforce Bernini’s concept of integrating architecture and sculpture, making the basilica an important example of Italo-Flemish design.
Margaret of Austria (1480–1530) arrived at the French court in 1483 as a three-year-old betrothed to the Dauphin Charles, and did not leave until 1493, when the Treaty of Senlis finally settled the terms of her return after Charles had married someone else. She had spent a decade being prepared to be Queen of France, and the French court had simply moved on. Don Juan of Castile (1478–1497) died six months into their marriage. Philibert II of Savoy (1480–1504), by her own account the one she had chosen freely, was dead within three years. When Maximilian I (1459–1519) appointed her Regent of the Habsburg Netherlands in 1507, she was twenty-six. She dressed in widow’s black for the rest of her life and refused to remarry.
The palace she made her headquarters in Mechelen had originally belonged to Hieronymus Lauweryn (c.1470–1524), a councillor from a Bruges humanist family. Construction proceeded across three overlapping phases. Antoon I Keldermans (c.1450–1512), city architect of Mechelen, began the expansion work from 1507; after his death, his son Antoon II Keldermans (d.1515) continued until his own death; Rombout II Keldermans (c.1460–1531) then carried the project forward, designing the Gothic structure of the main complex around 1515–17. The Renaissance façade along the Keizerstraat was applied by Guyot de Beaugrant (c.1500–d. after 1549), a Lorraine-born sculptor and architect trained in the French manner: paired pilasters, decorated spandrels, and horizontal string courses, measured and symmetrical in the Loire valley way, set against the Gothic vocabulary of the rear wing and courtyard behind it. The heraldic arms of Margaret and her nephew Charles V (1500–1558), alongside a figure of Justice, remain above the entrance (De Jonge, 2005).
Mechelen was a practical choice before it was a prestigious one. Close enough to Antwerp, Brussels, and Ghent to function as a seat of government, it was sufficiently removed from their factional pressures to offer some operational stability. Antonio de Beatis, chaplain and amanuensis to Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona (1474–1519) on his European tour of 1517–18, found the palace ‘very fine and well-appointed though not particularly imposing’ (de Beatis, 1979). What it lacked in scale it compensated for in density of activity: the household at any given time comprised around a hundred and fifty people, most of them living in the city and entering the palace each morning. Among those in residence were Charles and his sisters Eleanor (1498–1558), Isabella (1501–1526), and Mary (1505–1558), whose governess Anna de Beaumont oversaw their daily care under Margaret’s supervision. Charles received part of his education here, guided by Guillaume de Croÿ (1458–1521), Lord of Chièvres, and later by Mercurino Gattinara (1465–1530), who would become his imperial chancellor.
The court’s cultural life was built on deliberate accumulation. Jacopo de’ Barbari (c.1460/70–before 1516), the Venetian painter who had been the first Italian Renaissance artist of stature to work in Northern Europe, served as court painter from around 1511 until his death. Bernard van Orley (c.1488–1541) was appointed his successor as official court painter on 23 May 1518; Conrad Meit (c.1475/80–1550/51), the German-born sculptor, joined the court in 1514 and remained its sculptor until Margaret’s death. Jan Gossaert (c.1478–1532) was also a presence. According to Dagmar Eichberger, the collection was arranged as something close to a proto-museum, with Margaret herself leading guided tours for prominent guests (Eichberger, 2002). The library held works by Christine de Pizan, Boccaccio, Ovid, Boethius, and Aristotle. Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was among the humanists who visited. The Belgian historian Ghislaine de Boom (1895–1957) described the court as ‘une école d’éducation princière et un centre de haute civilisation’ [a princely school and a centre of high culture] (de Boom, 1935). Among those who passed through it was Anne Boleyn (c.1501–1536), who served as one of Margaret’s eighteen filles d’honneur from 1513. Margaret wrote to her father Thomas Boleyn that she found the girl “‘so bright and pleasant for her young age’ that she was more indebted to him for sending her than he was to her.
The most consequential act of Margaret’s regency was conducted not from Mechelen but at the negotiating table. In 1529, as Charles V’s representative at Cambrai, she concluded the Treaty of Cambrai – the Paix des Dames, signed on 3 August 1529 – with Louise of Savoy (1476–1531), mother of Francis I (1494–1547). The two women had known each other since childhood: both had been brought up at the French court under Anne de Beaujeu from 1483, and Louise had been Philibert II’s sister, making her and Margaret sisters-in-law after 1501. Together they ended more than a decade of warfare between the Habsburg and Valois dynasties in a matter of weeks, producing a settlement that Charles’s generals had failed to secure by force. Margaret died the following year, in December 1530.
Margaret of York (1446–1503), widow of Charles the Bold (1433–1477), had made Mechelen a centre of Burgundian devotional patronage a generation earlier; her palace stood directly across the street from the Hof van Savoye, and the Habsburg children lived there during the same years. Margaret of Austria was Charles the Bold’s granddaughter. The two women never overlapped in Mechelen, but the institutional framework Margaret of York had established was part of what her successor inherited and redirected toward humanist and diplomatic ends (De Jonge, 2005).
The building’s subsequent history moved steadily away from its origins. In 1546 the explosion of the city’s gunpowder store at the Zandpoort caused repairable damage. From 1561 the palace served as the residence of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517–1586), the first Archbishop of Mechelen and Philip II’s chief adviser in the Netherlands, until 1564 when he was forced out under pressure from the Flemish nobility. The city repurchased it in 1609, and from 1616 it housed the Great Council, the highest court of law in the Southern Netherlands, a function it retained until 1795. The Renaissance façade along the Keizerstraat survives largely intact; the inner courtyard and southern wing retain something of their sixteenth-century character. The arms of Margaret and Charles V are still legible above the entrance.
de Beatis, A. (1979) The Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis: Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, France and Italy, 1517–1518, translated by J. R. Hale and J. M. A. Lindon, edited by J. R. Hale. London: Hakluyt Society. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292023498 (Accessed:1 June 2024).
De Boom, G. (1935) Marguerite d’Autriche-Savoie et la Pré-Renaissance [Margaret of Austria-Savoy and the Pre-Renaissance]. Paris and Brussels: G. van Oest
De Jonge, K. (2005) ‘The principal residences in Mechelen: the Court of Cambrai and the Court of Savoy’, in Eichberger, D. (ed.) Women of Distinction: Margaret of York, Margaret of Austria. Turnhout: Brepols
Eichberger, D. (2003) ‘A cultural centre in the southern Netherlands: the court of Archduchess Margaret of Austria (1480–1530) in Mechelen’, in Damen, M. and Schnerb, B. (eds.) Princes and Princely Culture 1450–1650, vol. 1. Leiden: Brill, pp. 239–258. Available at: https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004253520/B9789004253520-s011.xml (Accessed: 1 June 2024).
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.
De Haverwerf, a historic quay along the River Dijle in Mechelen, has been associated with the oat trade since at least 1301, when the city’s mercantile privileges made it a key distribution point for grain along inland waterways. By the seventeenth century, as river commerce brought prosperity, the quay became lined with ornate Baroque houses that reflected the wealth of their owners and the city’s artistic ambitions.
Among the best preserved are Het Paradijske (‘Little Paradise’), a corner house distinguished by reliefs depicting the ‘Earthly Paradise’ and ‘The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil’; De Duiveltjes (“The Little Devils”), noted for its carved wooden façade and a relief of ‘The Prodigal Son’, named for the devil-shaped pillars that flank it; and Sint-Jozef, whose relief shows St Joseph holding the Christ Child. This part of the quay also adjoins Steenstraat — later renamed Van Beethovenstraat — where the composer Ludwig van Beethoven’s great-grandfather, the musician Michiel van Beethoven, once lived, linking the street’s mercantile and architectural history to an enduring musical legacy.
De Haverwerf, a historic quay along the River Dijle in MechelenDe Haverwerf in MechelenDe Haverwerf in Mechelen
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.
In May 1664 the Norbertine nuns of Leliëndaal, whose convent name means the vale of lilies, were told that the façade of their half-built church was leaning forward, and when the architect proposed ways of disguising the fault they refused them and had the front taken down and rebuilt. The dispute was one of several with Lucas Faydherbe (1617–1697), the leading sculptor of Mechelen, over cost and workmanship, and together with the demolition it delayed the building by roughly five years, so that after the laying of the foundation stone in 1662 the first mass was not celebrated until 1670 and the church was not consecrated until 1674 (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997). The difficulty is not surprising, since Leliëndaal was the first substantial building Faydherbe designed on his own, and he undertook it as a sculptor with little experience of construction.
Faydherbe had trained and worked as a sculptor for most of his career before he turned to architecture. He was born in Mechelen in 1617 into a family of image-makers, the son of the sculptor Hendrik Faydherbe, whose sister Maria was herself a sculptor of some standing, and of Cornelia Franchoys, who came from a line of painters (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997). In 1636 he went to Antwerp and into the studio of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), who treated the young man almost as one of the household, left him in charge of the studio, and wrote him a run of letters that still survives, easy and warm in tone (Magurn, 1955). Rubens held that sculpture and painting were a single art, and Faydherbe learned to turn the master’s swelling, muscular manner into carved figures, returning to Mechelen in 1640, the year Rubens died, as the leading sculptor of his city (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997).He took up architecture only in his forties, and he approached the design of a church much as he approached a large sculptural commission, as a single composition to be resolved as a whole.
That approach is evident in the concentration of ornament on a single face of the building, since the side walls are of plain buttressed brick with sandstone dressings, while the front toward the Bruul, which originally screened the choir at the east end rather than serving as an entrance, is faced in sandstone and composed as three bays in two superposed storeys, articulated by ringed pilasters with Ionic capitals, the broad central bay set beneath a round-arched niche, a broken pediment and a scrolled gable. The design carries the Rubensian character Faydherbe had absorbed in Antwerp, and it belongs to the Brabantine Baroque idiom developed earlier in the century by Jacques Francart (1583–1651), whose Beguinage church in Mechelen Faydherbe had completed, so that the attribution sometimes made to the Leuven Jesuit architect Willem Hesius, and the placing of his work in Antwerp, are seeems both mistaken (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997; Vlieghe, 1998). The front no longer stands as Faydherbe left it, because its crowning gable was taken down in the nineteenth century for fear that it would collapse, and its figures have changed with the building’s owners, the central niche that first held a monstrance receiving a statue of the Virgin in 1814, and the statue of Saint Norbert set above it in 1715, whose plinth carries a chronogram naming him guardian of the vale of lilies, giving way under the Jesuits to a Saint Ignatius in 1901 (Eeman, Kennes and Mondelaers, 1984). Inside, the church is a single aisle of five bays whose ringed pilasters, entablature and transverse arches are all of black marble and carry cross-rib vaults, lit by two tiers of segmental-headed windows in black marble surrounds, so that the dark stone stands out sharply against the pale plaster of the walls.
The community did not survive the reforms of the late eighteenth century. The priory was suppressed by the Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) in 1783, its buildings passing briefly to the Ursulines in 1786 and then, in 1798, into the hands of the civil hospices, which kept the former convent as a home for the elderly and orphans and let the church fall to secular use, as a warehouse and joinery, with a wall run across it for an infirmary and the gable of the front pulled down. Worship resumed in 1834, and when the Jesuits acquired the church in 1900 and 1901 their architect reversed its plan, moving the choir from the east to the west and turning the two small doors in the Bruul front, until then a screen rather than an entrance, into the way in, besides adding a Lourdes grotto and new furniture (Eeman, Kennes and Mondelaers, 1984). A good deal of the original decoration nonetheless remains in place. The high altar still carries a carved group of the Virgin among angels by Artus Quellinus the Younger (1625–1700); a seventeenth-century marble screen with three bas-reliefs on its balustrade is attributed to Faydherbe himself; the choir panelling was made up from the seventeenth-century stalls; and a seventeenth-century painting of the investiture of Saint Norbert by Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg (1630–1676) and Lucas Franchoys the Younger (1616–1681), Faydherbe’s uncle on his mother’s side, hangs in the church (Eeman, Kennes and Mondelaers, 1984). What went was the finest of the movable furnishing, sold during and after the French period and now in Saint Rumbold’s Cathedral, among it the great oak pulpit of 1723 by Michiel van der Voort the Elder (1667–1737) and Theodoor Verhaegen (1701–1759), a marble communion rail of 1678 by Quellinus the Younger, a painted and gilded tabernacle of 1736, and six marble medallions by Pieter Valckx (1734–1785); the oak confessionals, pulpit and panelling now in the church are of the early twentieth century, brought in during the Jesuits’ time.
De Nijn, H., Vlieghe, H. and Devisscher, H. (eds.) (1997) Lucas Faydherbe 1617–1697: Mechels beeldhouwer & architect [Lucas Faydherbe 1617–1697: Mechelen Sculptor and Architect]. Mechelen: Stedelijke Musea
Magurn, R. S. (ed. and trans.) (1955) The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Vlieghe, H. (1998) Flemish Art and Architecture 1585–1700. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
In 1659 the Jesuits of Mechelen acquired the relic that would govern the scale of their greatest building in the city, a portion of the arm of Saint Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the missionary reputed to have baptised many thousands across India, the Moluccas and Japan. The chapel of their noviciate soon proved too small for the pilgrims who came to venerate it, and the Society resolved to raise a church equal to the crowds, one intended for a shifting body of visitors rather than a settled parish (Brouwers, 1977). The building was placed under Xavier and under the founder of the order, Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), and throughout the Jesuit period it was known as the Sint-Franciscus-Xaveriuskerk, the Church of Saint Francis Xavier. Its present and far longer title dates only from the dissolution of the Society: in Dutch, Kerk van de Heilige Apostelen Petrus en Paulus op visitatie bij de Heilige Ignatius van Loyola en de Heilige Franciscus Xaverius; in English, the Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul on Visitation to Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier; in ordinary use, the Sint-Pieters-en-Pauluskerk.
The plot they built on had belonged to the house of Burgundy. In 1477, newly widowed, Margaret of York (1446–1503) took over the Hof van Kamerijk on the Keizerstraat, a mansion raised by the Keldermans, Mechelen’s dynasty of master-masons, and added a great reception hall; within a generation it had become the Keizershof, the imperial court where the future Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) spent much of his childhood. The ruling archdukes handed the palace to the Society of Jesus in 1611 for a noviciate and college, and the Jesuits put their church and convent across its grounds. A wing of the old palace still stands beside the church, restored in the nineteenth century and now the city theatre, while directly opposite rises the palace of Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), once regent of the Netherlands, so that the Baroque front of a pilgrimage church faces two survivors of the Habsburg court.
The money for it came from Antwerp, by way of a refusal. An Antwerp widow whose three sons had entered the Society left a fund for a second Jesuit church in her own city, meant to stand beside the great Sint-Carolus-Borromeus; when the Antwerp chapter and magistrate blocked the plan in 1657, the order carried the budget and the design to Mechelen (Eeman, Kennes and Mondelaers, 1984). The family’s single tie to the arts ran through the designer, the widow’s son Antoon Losson (1612–1678), a Jesuit and self-taught architect who drew the plans and helped lay the first stone but died the year the church opened. From 1669 he had the help of a far more seasoned figure, Willem van Hees, latinised as Guilielmus Hesius (1601–1690), a Jesuit mathematician and astronomer who corresponded with Christiaan Huygens and had already designed the Saint Michael’s church in Leuven.
A Jesuit church of this generation was seldom invented from nothing, and this one wore its models in plain sight. The plan followed the now-vanished Jesuit church at Ypres, itself descended from Pieter Huyssens’s (1577–1637) Saint-Loup at Namur and Sint-Walburga at Bruges, while the façade took up the colossal two-storey order of the Brussels Jesuit church by the court architect Jacques Francart (1583–1651), the design that had set the pattern for Jesuit fronts across the province (Eeman et al., 1984). The first stone went down in 1670, the first mass was said in 1677, and the solemn consecration waited until 1694; the crowning gable, the one wholly original stroke, was finished only in 1709, decades after Losson’s death and it seems against his drawings (Hammenecker, 1976).
Inside, everything bends towards the sermon. A wide central vessel runs between two aisles under a single continuous vault, carried on tall columns that keep the view clear from any seat to the pulpit and the high altar, the aisled and column-divided plan a preaching order wanted for a church meant to be heard. The furnishings that fill it are the real reason to come, and they gather up two generations of the region’s finest carvers (Eeman et al., 1984).
The marble altars belong to the sculptor who did most to carry Rubens’s manner into stone. The side altars are given to Lucas Faydherbe (1617–1697), born into a Mechelen family of sculptors and alabaster-carvers, apprenticed at nineteen to Rubens in Antwerp and left running the workshop in the painter’s last years; he cut ivories under Rubens’s eye, and when a hurried marriage sent him home without the expected journey to Italy, it was Rubens’s word that eased him into the Mechelen guild (De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997). A few years before the Jesuits began their church, Faydherbe had built the marble high altar of St Rumbold’s Cathedral a short walk away, to a design by the same Hesius who would advise Losson, so the small world of Mechelen’s Baroque keeps circling back on itself (Eeman et al., 1984).
The pulpit answers the altars in oak, and it came from Antwerp’s grandest carving dynasty. Made around 1700 by Hendrik Frans Verbruggen (1654–1724), the son and grandson of sculptors married into the Quellinus family, it belongs to the new fashion for the naturalistic pulpit, in which the structure disappears into a single carved scene; Verbruggen’s masterpiece in the manner, made for the Jesuit church of Leuven and now in the cathedral of Brussels, sets Adam and Eve beneath the Virgin (Eeman et al., 1984). At Mechelen he balanced the whole pulpit on a globe. The four then-known continents sit personified with their animals at the foot, America with a turtle and a snake, Asia turbaned beside a leopard, Africa in elephant hide with a crocodile, Europe with her cornucopia and book; above them run the emblems of the evangelists and medallions of Jesuit saints, and a pair of trumpeting angels lifts a canopy carved with the Holy Spirit. The argument in wood repeats the one the relic had made, the faith carried out to the ends of the earth with Xavier as its agent.
The aisles hold the church’s strangest feature, and its best joke. Fourteen confessionals, carved between 1683 and 1684 and worked into the wainscoting, are the joint labour of Nicolaas van der Veken (1637–1709), a Mechelen pupil of Faydherbe, and the Antwerp sculptor Ludovicus Willemssens (1630–1702), among others (Eeman et al., 1984; De Nijn, Vlieghe and Devisscher, 1997). Fourteen is a great many for one church, and local wit blamed the cattle market on the neighbouring Veemarkt, where the trading was held to involve a good deal of lying; the plainer reason is the pilgrimage, since a visitor who meant to touch the relics was to reach them free of sin, and confession on that scale needed room.
When the order was dissolved, the building barely changed. The Society of Jesus was suppressed in 1773, and the neighbouring parish of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, its own medieval church by then crumbling, asked to move in; the diocese kept the Jesuit dedication and set the parish’s apostles over it, which is how the church came by its long double name (Brouwers, 1977). Almost nothing else was touched, so the interior survives as a single Baroque ensemble of the 1680s to the 1700s, and a church shaped for a missionary order and its pilgrims went on serving an ordinary parish without surrendering its pulpit, its fourteen confessionals, or its argument that the faith had been sent around the world from this spot.
Brouwers, L. (1977) De Jezuïeten te Mechelen in de 17de en 18de eeuw [The Jesuits in Mechelen in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries]. Mechelen
De Nijn, H., Vlieghe, H. and Devisscher, H. (eds.) (1997) Lucas Faydherbe 1617–1697. Mechels beeldhouwer & architect [Lucas Faydherbe 1617–1697. Mechelen Sculptor and Architect]. 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. Available at: https://id.erfgoed.net/erfgoedobjecten/3466 and https://id.erfgoed.net/erfgoedobjecten/3467 (Accessed: 22 May 2024).
Hammenecker, H. (1976) De bouwgeschiedenis van de Sint-Pieter- en Pauluskerk te Mechelen [The Building History of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Mechelen], unpublished licentiate dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
The current building, dedicated to Alexius of Edessa and Catherine of Alexandria, is a beguine church constructed between 1629 and 1647. It is a fascinating example of Counter-Reformation Italo-Flemish Jesuit architecture, representing a fusion of local architectural traditions with the more dynamic and colourful Italian Baroque style. The design and construction were overseen by two prominent architects, Pieter Huyssens (1577–1637) and Jacques Francart (1582/83–1651), who were friends of Rubens and collaborated on numerous projects. Influenced by their travels and exposure to contemporary Italian architecture, both architects incorporated local traditions to engineer tall structures based on Brabantian Gothic principles, ensuring stability on the soft soil for centuries. This Italo-Flemish fusion is particularly evident in the arched arcades supported by Corinthian pillars and an imposing cornice, where the cross-rib vaults and ceiling reference the local Brabantian Gothic tradition.
The church also celebrates local artistic traditions with masterpieces from the 16th and 17th centuries, including works by the Workshop of Quentin Matsys (1466–1530), Gaspar de Crayer (1584–1669), Jan Cossiers (1600–1671), Theodor Boeijermans (1620–1678), and Lucas Franchoys II (1616–1681), who was from Mechelen. Franchoys the Younger significantly contributed to filling the local churches with beautiful Baroque compositions, including ‘The Ascension of Mary’ for the altar in this church.
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.
