Louvain, In Fact, Unlike The
Two "Dead" Cities Of West Flanders And Brabant, Wears A Briskly
Business-Like Aspect, And Pulses With Modern Life.
I suppose that
I ought properly to have written all this in the past tense, for
Louvain is now a heap of smoking cinders.
The famous Town Hall
has, indeed, so far been spared by ruffians who would better have
spared the magnificent Cloth Hall at Ypres; between these two
great buildings, the products respectively of the Belgian genius
of the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries, "culture" could hardly
hesitate. The Hotel-de-Ville at Louvain is, indeed, an astonishing
structure, just as the cathedral at Antwerp is astonishing; but
one has to be very indulgent, or very forgetful of better models,
not to deprecate this absolutely wanton riot of overladened
panelling and bulging, top-heavy pinnacles. The expiring throes of
Belgian Gothic were a thousand degrees less chaste than the
classicism of the early Renaissance: few, perhaps, will prefer the
lacelike over-richness of this midfifteenth century town hall at
Louvain to the restraint of the charming sixteenth-century facade
of the Hotel de Ville at Leiden. Opposite the town hall is the
huge fifteenth-century church of St. Pierre, the interior of
which, still smothered in whitewash in 1910, was remarkable for
its florid Gothic rood-screen and soaring Tabernacle, or Ciborium.
The stumpy fragment of tower at the west end is said once to have
been five hundred and thirty feet high! It is not surprising to
read that this last, and crowning, manifestation of a familiar
Belgian weakness was largely wrecked by a hurricane in 1604.
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