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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