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F. SURROUNDINGS
The only excursion of interest in the immediate neighbourhood of Brussels is that to Laeken (recommended), which may be taken by tram from the Inner Boulevards, the Gare du Nord, the Gare du Midi, Bourse, etc. Cars run every 10 minutes. The modern Church of St. Mary at Laeken is a handsome unfinished building. A little to the R. lie the Park and the Royal Château, inaccessible and unimportant. The road behind the church ascends the Montagne du Tonnerre, a little hill with a Monument to Léopold I., not unlike the Albert Memorial in London. A good *view of Brussels is obtained from the summit of the monument, ascended by a winding staircase. (No fee.) The easiest way to make this excursion is by carriage in the afternoon.
Unless you are a military man or a student of tactics, I do not advise you to undertake the dull and wearisome excursion to Waterloo. The battle-field is hot and shade-less in summer, cold and draughty in spring and autumn. The points of interest, such as they are, lie at considerable distances. Waterloo is country, and ugly country – no more. The general traveller who desires to be conducted round the various strategic landmarks of the field will find his wants amply catered for by Baedeker. But I advise him to forego that foregone disappointment.
The time saved by not visiting Waterloo may, however, be well devoted to a morning excursion to
Louvain
[This ancient and important town, which should be visited both on account of its magnificent Hôtel-de-Ville, and in order to make a better acquaintance with Dierick Bouts, the town painter, can be conveniently reached by train from the Gare du Nord. The best trains take little more than half an hour to do the journey. A single morning is sufficient for the excursion, especially if you start early. Wednesday is the most convenient day, as a quick train then returns about 1.30. (Consult Bradshaw.) Lunch can be obtained (good) in the large white building on the left-hand side of the Hôtel-de-Ville. (It is a private club, but contains a public restaurant, on the R., within, to which, push through boldly.) If you have Conway, take him with you on this excursion, to compare the doubtful Roger van der Weyden at St. Pierre with the woodcut he gives of its supposed original at Madrid. Read before you start (or on the way) his admirable accounts of Roger van der Weyden and Dierick Bouts.
Louvain is, in a certain sense, the mother city of Brussels. Standing on its own little navigable river, the Dyle, it was, till the end of the 14th century, the capital of the Counts and of the Duchy of Brabant. It had a large population of weavers, engaged in the cloth trade. Here, as elsewhere, the weavers formed the chief bulwark of freedom in the population. In 1378, however, after a popular rising, Duke Wenseslaus besieged and conquered the city; and the tyrannical sway of the nobles, whom he re-introduced, aided by the rise of Ghent or, later, of Antwerp, drove away trade from the city. Many of the weavers emigrated to Holland and England, where they helped to establish the woollen industry.
During the early Middle Ages, Louvain was also celebrated for its University, founded in 1426, and suppressed by the French in 1797. It was re-established by the Dutch in 1817, but abandoned by the Belgian Government in 1834, and then started afresh in the next year as a free private Roman Catholic University. Charles V. was educated here.
The modern town has shrunk far away within its ancient ramparts, whose site is now for the most part occupied by empty Boulevards. It is still the stronghold of Roman Catholic theology in Belgium.]
As you emerge from the station, you come upon a small Place, adorned with a statue (by Geefs) of Sylvain van de Weyer, a revolutionary of 1830, and long Belgian Minister in England. Take the long straight street up which the statue looks. This leads direct to the Grand’ Place, the centre of the town, whence the chief streets radiate in every direction, the ground-plan recalling that of a Roman city.
The principal building in the Grand’ Place is the Hôtel-de-Ville, standing out with three sides visible from the Place, and probably the finest civic building in Belgium. It is of very florid late-Gothic architecture, between 1448 and 1463. Begin first with the left façade, exhibiting three main storeys, with handsome Gothic windows. Above come a gallery and then a gable-end, flanked by octagonal turrets, and bearing a similar turret on its summit. In the centre of the gable is a little projecting balcony of the kind so common on Belgian civic buildings. The architecture of the niches and turrets is of very fine florid Gothic, in better taste than that at Ghent of nearly the same period. The statues which fill the niches are modern. Those of the first storey represent personages of importance in the local history of the city: those of the second, the various mediæval guilds or trades: those of the third, the Counts of Louvain and Dukes of Brabant of all ages. The bosses or corbels which support the statues are carved with scriptural scenes in high relief. I give the subjects of a few (beginning L.): the reader must decipher the remainder for himself. The Court of Heaven: The Fall of the Angels into the visible Jaws of Hell: Adam and Eve in the Garden: The Expulsion from Paradise: The Death of Abel, with quaint rabbits escaping: The Drunkenness of Noah: Abraham and Lot: etc.
The main façade has an entrance staircase, and two portals in the centre, above which are figures of St. Peter, L., and Our Lady and Child, R., the former in compliment to the patron of the church opposite. This façade has three storeys, decorated with Gothic windows, and capped by a gallery parapet, above which rises the high-pitched roof, broken by several quaint small windows. At either end are the turrets of the gable, with steps to ascend them. The rows of statues represent as before (in 4 tiers) persons of local distinction, mediæval guilds, and the Princes who have ruled Brabant and Louvain. Here again the sculptures beneath the bosses should be closely inspected. Among the most conspicuous are the Golden Calf, the Institution of Sacrifices in the Tabernacle, Balaam’s Ass, Susannah and the Elders, etc.
The gable-end to the R., ill seen from the narrow street, resembles in its features the one opposite it, but this façade, which was even finer than the others, is at present in course of wholesale restoration.
The best general view is obtained from the door of St. Pierre, or near either corner of the Place, diagonally opposite.
Do not trouble about the interior.
Opposite the Hôtel-de-Ville stands the Church of St. Pierre, originally erected in 1040, but entirely rebuilt in 1430, to which date the whole existing edifice belongs. It is a handsome late-Gothic building, with a fine West Front, never completed, and a truncated tower. The central West Window is imposing, but the ruined portal has a depressing effect. Walk round the church once outside to observe its exterior architecture, obscured towards the Grand’ Place by the usual agglomeration of small Renaissance houses. The main entrance is in the South Transept; above it stands a poor modern statue of the patron, St. Peter. The High Choir, with its flying buttresses, would form a fine element if the houses were cleared away, so as to afford a view of the chapels below.
Now view the interior. Go at once into the body of the church. The general effect is handsome, but the walls are cold and white-washed. The church has a fine Nave, with single Aisles, short Transepts, high Choir, and Ambulatory. The Nave, Transepts, and Choir, have all an exactly similar clerestory, with an unusual Triforium of open latticework, and tracery in the same style in the spandrils of the arches.
Go down to the W. end of the Nave. The entrance doors at this end have good but not beautiful carved woodwork of the Renaissance.
Left Aisle. First chapel. Late Gothic copper font, with large crane, to support a heavy iron cover, now removed. The other chapels on this side contain nothing of interest.
Right Aisle. First chapel (of San Carlo Borromeo), has an altar-piece, copied from one by De Crayer, carried off by the French and now at Nancy. It represents San Carlo ministering to the plague-stricken at Milan. Also, a triptych, by Van de Baeren, 1594. Centre, St. Dorothea beheaded. Her head praising God. L., Her trial before the governor, Fabricius. R., Her torture in enduring the sight of her sister’s martyrdom. Statue of San Carlo by Geefs.
Second chapel, of the Armourers, has a railing with arms and cannon, and contains an old blackened crucifix, much venerated because it is said to have caught a thief who had entered the church to steal the treasures.
The pulpit is a carved wooden monstrosity of the 18th century, representing, behind, the Repentance of Peter, with the cock crowing, a maladroit subject for a church dedicated to the saint. In front, the Conversion of St. Paul, with his horse overthrown. Above are two palm trees.
The Choir is separated from the Transepts and Nave by a very handsome and elaborate *Rood-Loft, in the finest flamboyant late-Gothic style (1450), one of the best still remaining examples in Europe. It supports a Crucifixion, with St. John and Our Lady. Its arcade of three handsome arches is surmounted by a sculptured balustrade, containing figures of saints (the Saviour, Our Lady and Child, the Twelve Apostles with the instruments of their martyrdom, the Doctors of the Church, and a few others). Examine carefully.
Now, pass behind the Choir, into the Ambulatory, beginning on the N., or left side. The first recess has a fine mediæval tomb of Mathilde de Flandre. On your R., in the Choir, a little further on, is a beautiful late-Gothic tabernacle or canopy of 1450, gilded, and containing scenes from the Passion. Just behind the High Altar is a curious little 15th century relief: Centre, the Crucifixion with St. John and Our Lady: R., The Resurrection, with sleeping Roman soldiers: L., The donor, with his patron St. John the Baptist.
The first chapel beyond the High Altar contains **The Last Supper, by Dierick Bouts. This picture forms the central piece of a triptych, painted for the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament. The L. wing of it is now at Munich, and the R. at Berlin. It represented, when entire, the same mystical series of the Institution of the Eucharist which we have already seen in the Pourbus of the Cathedral at Bruges. The central panel represented the Institution of the Eucharist; the L. (Munich) has Melchizedeck offering bread and wine to Abraham; the R. (Berlin) Elijah fed by ravens in the wilderness. On the outer sides of the panels are two similar typical subjects: L. (Munich), the Gathering of the Manna or food from Heaven; and R. (Berlin), the Feast of the Passover, the Paschal Lamb being regarded as a type of the Christian sacrifice. The picture as it stands in this chapel has of course lost its mystical significance. It closely resembles the smaller Last Supper in the Brussels Gallery; but the architecture here is Gothic, not Renaissance. Study well, especially the figures of the donor (by the door) and the servant. The floor is characteristic.
Also a **triptych, by Dierick Bouts, the Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, patron against intestinal diseases: a bishop, martyred at Formia in the persecution of Diocletian. It represents the hideous episode of the unwinding of the saint’s bowels. The executioner on the L. is a good specimen of Dierick Bouts’s rude artisan figures; he looks like a cobbler. In the background is the Emperor Diocletian, richly attired, with a courtier, whose attitude recalls more than one of those in the Justice of Otho. The landscape is characteristic of Bouts’s manner. This is a good, hard, dry picture. The L. panel has St. Jerome, robed as cardinal, with his lion; the R. has St. Anthony, accompanied by a vanquished demon. This, however, is a St. Anthony as the abbot, not as the hermit in the desert.
On the roof of the fourth chapel have recently been discovered some frescoes, from which the plaster and whitewash is now being removed.
In the chapel next it to the R. is a triptych, the Descent from the Cross (covered, the Sacristan will open it: 1 franc); usually attributed to Roger van der Weyden, but much disputed. It is probably a smaller (altered) copy of the famous composition in the Escurial at Madrid (see Conway). The central picture has Christ supported by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, with the fainting Madonna, St. John, and the other Maries. The singularly unpleasing fat cook-like Magdalen, in a rich robe, is a constant feature in the group of Descents from the Cross by Roger and his pupils. Study this picture. The L. panel has a good portrait of the donor, with his two sons, accompanied by his patron St. James the Greater (or St. William?). The R. panel has his wife, with her two daughters and her patroness, St. Adelaide (or St. Elizabeth of Hungary, holding the crown which she gave up for the Franciscan profession?).
In the sixth chapel is a fine Renaissance tomb, representing Adolf van Baussede in adoration before the Trinity, introduced by his patron St. Adolphus, with allegorical figures of Faith, Hope, and Charity. The work is almost Italian in character.
Over the High Altar is a modern figure of the patron, St. Peter, enthroned as pope, and with papal symbols behind him. Left of it is the fine canopy we have already observed from the outside, with scenes from the Passion. The architecture here is striking.
The great Quentin Matsys of the Family of St. Anne in the Brussels Picture Gallery was formerly an altar-piece in this church.
There is nothing else at Louvain that need detain you. If you like, you can stroll a little way down the Rue de Namur, just to the R. of the Hôtel-de-Ville. It contains some good old houses. The desolate building on your R. was originally the Halles, but is now the University. It was built for the Guild of Clothmakers in 1317, and has been wholly modernised; but there are some good Gothic arches on the basement floor within (approach down the side street to the R.). Further on is the Collège du St. Esprit on the R., and the Church of St. Michel (uninteresting) on the L. The street which here runs off obliquely conducts to the Collège Marie-Thérèse, and the Collège Adrien VI., uninteresting, and all used as hostelries for the students. The only other objects to look at in Louvain are the choir-stalls in carved wood, early Renaissance, at the Church of St. Gertrude, dedicated to the Abbess of Nivelles and aunt of St. Gudula. It lies down the Rue de Malines, in the opposite direction from the Rue de Namur. You have then seen Louvain.
On your way from Brussels to Antwerp, you ought to visit Malines Cathedral. The easiest way is to book your luggage through, and then stop for an hour or two at Malines, going on by a later train.
IV
ANTWERP
A. ORIGINS OF ANTWERP
ANTWERP, the seaport of the Schelde estuary, is practically the youngest (and the least interesting) of the great Belgian towns. It should therefore be visited last by the historically-minded tourist. A small town, known in Flemish as Antwerpen (“at the Wharf”), – a name altered in French and English into Anvers and Antwerp, – existed here, it is true, as early as the 7th century, and suffered heavily in the 9th from the ubiquitous Northmen. But its situation at the open mouth of the great estuary of the Schelde, exposed to every passing piratical invader, rendered it unfit for the purposes of early commerce. The trade of Flanders, in its first beginnings, accordingly concentrated itself in the more protected inland ports like Bruges and Ghent; while that of Brabant, of which province Antwerp itself formed a part, found a safer home in Brussels or Louvain, far up some minor internal river. Hence the rise of Antwerp dates no further back than the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century.
Its rise, that is to say, as a great commercial port, for from an early period it was the capital of a petty margrave, under the Duke of Brabant. As northern Europe grew gradually quieter during the 11th and 12th centuries, Antwerp rose somewhat in importance; and the magnificence of its cathedral, the earliest part of which dates from 1352, sufficiently shows that the town was increasing in wealth and population during the palmy period when Bruges and Ghent governed the trade of the Continent. But when, in the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th, Bruges began to decline (partly from political causes, but more still from changes in navigation and trade routes), Antwerp rose suddenly to the first position in the Low Countries and perhaps in Europe. Its large, deep, and open port was better adapted to the increasing shipping of the new epoch than were the shallow and narrow canals or rivers of Ghent, Bruges, and Brussels. The discovery of America, and of the route to India by the Cape of Good Hope, had revolutionized both commerce and navigation; vessels were built larger and of deeper draught; and the Schelde became for a time what the Thames, the Clyde, and the Mersey have become in our own period. Antwerp under Charles V. was probably even more prosperous and wealthier than Venice. The centre of traffic was shifting from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic seaboard. The city reached its highest point of prosperity about 1568, when it is said that thousands of vessels lay at anchor in the Schelde, and that more than a hundred craft sailed and arrived daily. Even allowing for the smaller burden of those days, however, this is probably an exaggeration. The great fairs of Antwerp, of which those of Leipzig and Nijni Novgorod are now the only modern representatives, also drew thousands of merchants from all parts of the world. The chief imports were wool and other agricultural produce from England, grain from the Baltic, wines from France and Germany, spices and sugar from Portuguese territory, and silks and Oriental luxuries from Venice and other parts of Italy. The exports were the manufactured goods of Flanders and Brabant, countries which still took the lead in textile fabrics, tapestries, carpets, and many other important industries.
It is to this late period of wealth and prosperity that Antwerp owes most of the great buildings and works of art which still adorn it. Its cathedral, indeed, varies in date in different parts from the middle of the 14th to the beginning of the 16th century, and some portions were not quite completed till the 17th; but the general aspect of the core of the town is of the Renaissance epoch. It contains in its modern gallery not a few Flemish paintings of the earlier period, produced by the artists of Ghent, Bruges, and Brussels; but its own native art dates no further back than Quentin Matsys (1466-1531), the last of the painters of the Netherlands who adhered to the national type of art; while it reached its highest point in Rubens (1577-1640), who introduced into the Low Countries the developed style of the Italian Renaissance, adapted and strained through an essentially robust Flemish nature. It is only at Antwerp that these two great masters can be studied to the highest advantage; they illustrate, one the rise, the other the culmination and after-glow, of the greatness of their native city. I say native advisedly, for though Rubens most probably was born at Siegen (in Nassau), he was an Antwerper by descent, by blood, by nature, and by residence.
The decline of the city in later times was due to a variety of concurrent causes, some of them strangely artificial, which long distracted trade from one of its most natural outlets in Europe. The Spanish troops began the devastation, during the abortive attempt of the southern provinces to shake off the yoke of Spain; in 1576, the Town Hall and nearly a thousand noble buildings were burnt, while 8,000 people were ruthlessly massacred. In 1585, the Duke of Parma completed the destruction of the local prosperity: the population was largely scattered, and the trade of Antwerp completely ruined. The long and unsuccessful rebellion, the division which it unhappily caused between Holland and Belgium, and the rapid commercial rise, first of Amsterdam and then of England, all contributed to annihilate the mercantile importance of Antwerp. The Dutch erected forts on their own territory at the mouth of the Schelde, and refused to allow shipping to proceed up the river. Finally by the Treaty of Munster in 1648 it was agreed that no sea-going vessel should be allowed to ascend the estuary to Antwerp, but that all ships should unload at a Dutch port, goods being forwarded by river craft to the former capital of European commerce. From that date forward to the French occupation in 1794, Antwerp sank to the position of a mere local centre, while Rotterdam and Amsterdam took its place as commercial cities. In the latter year, however, the French reopened the navigation of the Schelde, and destroyed the iniquitous Dutch forts at the entrance to the river. Napoleon, in whose empire the town was included, constructed a harbour and built new quays; but after his fall, Antwerp was made over to Holland, and began to trade as a Dutch seaport. The erection of Belgium into a separate kingdom in 1830 again told against it, as the Dutch maintained their unjust power of levying tolls on the shipping; in addition to which drawback, Antwerp had suffered heavily from siege during the War of Independence. In 1863, however, the Dutch extortioners were bought off by a heavy money payment, and Antwerp, the natural outlet of the Schelde, and to a great extent of the German empire, once more regained its natural place as a main commercial port of Europe. Since that date, its rise has been extraordinarily rapid, in correspondence with the large development of Belgian manufactures and still more with the new position of Germany as a world-trading power. Indeed, nothing but the artificial restrictions placed upon its commerce by the selfishness and injustice of the Dutch could ever have prevented the seaport of the Schelde from ranking as one of the chief harbours of the world, as soon as ocean-going ships demanded ports of that size, and as commerce had no longer anything to fear from marauding pirates.
As a consequence of these conditions, we have to expect in Antwerp mainly a central town of the 15th and 16th centuries, with an immense modern outgrowth of very recent origin. Save its fine Cathedral, and its imported pictures, it has little or nothing of mediæval interest.
The population of Antwerp is almost entirely Flemish, though French is the language of the higher commerce; and the town is the stronghold of the old Flemish feeling in Belgium, as opposed to the Parisian tone of Brussels.
Concurrently with the rise of its renewed commercial importance, Antwerp has become once more a centre of Belgian art, and especially of the pure Flemish school of archaists, who have chosen their subjects from Flemish history, and followed to some extent the precedents of the early Flemish painters. Examples of these will meet us later.
Choose an hotel on the Place Verte, if possible, or at least very near it. You cannot gain a first impression of Antwerp in less than four or five days.
Antwerp is a confused town, a maze without a plan: till you have learnt your way about, I advise you to follow the tram-lines: you will thus avoid the slummy streets which abound even in the best quarter.
