The Church, In Fact, Looks, When Viewed Externally,
More Like Four Separate Churches Than One; And When We Step
Inside,
With all the best will in the world to make the best of
it, it is hard to find, much
To admire, and anything at all to
love, in these acres of dismally whitewashed walls, and long,
feeble lines of arcades without capitals. The inherent vice of
Belgian architecture - its lack of really beautiful detail, and
its fussy superfluity of pinnacle and panelling - seems to me here
to culminate. Belgium has really beautiful churches - not merely of
the thirteenth century, when building was lovely everywhere, but
later buildings, like Mons, and St. Pierre at Louvain; but Antwerp
is not of this category. Architecturally, perhaps, the best
feature of the whole church is the lofty spire (over four hundred
feet), which curiously resembles in general outline that of the
Hotel de Ville at Brussels (three hundred and seventy feet), and
dates from about the same period (roughly the middle of the
fifteenth century). As usual in Belgium, it is quite out of scale;
it is lucky, indeed, that the corresponding south-west tower has
never been completed, for the combination of the two would be
almost overwhelming. It is curious and interesting as an example
of a tower tapering upwards to a point in a succession of
diminishing stages, in contrast with tower and spire. France has
something like it, though far more beautiful, in the thirteenth-
century tower at Senlis; but England affords no parallel. I am not
sure who invented the quite happy phrase, "Confectioner's Gothic,"
but this tower at Antwerp is not badly described by it. It is
altogether too elaborate and florid, like the sugar pinnacle of a
wedding-cake.
This cathedral of Antwerp, however, though at the time that it was
built a mere collegiate church of secular canons, and only first
exalted to cathedral rank in 1559, is one of the largest churches
in superficial area in the world, a result largely due to its
possession, uniquely, of not less than six aisles, giving it a
total breadth of one hundred and seventy feet. Hung in the two
transepts respectively are the two great pictures by Rubens - the
"Elevation of the Cross" and the "Descent from the Cross" - that
are described at such length, and with so much critical
enthusiasm, by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his "Journey to Flanders and
Holland." The "Descent from the Cross," painted by Rubens in 1612,
when he was only thirty-five years old, is perhaps the more
splendid, and is specially remarkable for the daring with which
the artist has successfully ventured (what "none but great
colourists can venture") "to paint pure white linen near flesh."
His Christ, continues Sir Joshua, "I consider as one of the finest
figures that ever was invented: it is most correctly drawn, and I
apprehend in an attitude of the utmost difficulty to execute. The
hanging of the head on His shoulder, and the falling of the body
on one side, gives such an appearance of the heaviness of death,
that nothing can exceed it." Antwerp, of course, is full of
magnificent paintings by Rubens, though unfortunately the house in
which he lived in the Place de Meir (which is traversed by the
tram on its way from the Est Station to the Place Verte), which
was built by him in 1611, and in which he died in 1640, was almost
entirely rebuilt in 1703.
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