St. Gudule, Of Course, Should Certainly Be
Visited, Not Only For The Sake Of The General Fabric, Which,
Notwithstanding Its
Possession of TWO west towers, is typically
Belgian in its general character, but also for the sake of its
magnificent
Sixteenth and seventeenth century glass, and
especially for the sake of the five great windows in the Chapelle
du Saint Sacrement, which illustrate in a blaze of gorgeous colour
the story of how Jonathan the Jew bribed Jeanne de Louvain to
steal the three Consecrated Wafers, from which oozed, when
sacrilegiously stabbed by the sceptical Jew, the Sacred Blood of a
world's redemption. This story is told again - or rather, perhaps,
a similar story - in the splendid painted glass from the church of
St. Eloi that is now preserved at Rouen in the Archaeological
Museum. As for the Grande Place, or original market-place of the
city, which is bounded on one side by the magnificent Hotel de
Ville, on the opposite side by the rather heavy, rebuilt Maison du
Roi, and on the remaining two sides chiefly by the splendid old
seventeenth-century Corporation Houses of the various ancient city
guilds - Le Renard, the house of the silk-mercers and haberdashers;
Maison Cornet, the house of the boatmen, or "batelliers"; La
Louvre, the house of the archers; La Brouette, the house of the
carpenters; Le Sac, the house of the printers and booksellers; the
Cygne, the house of the butchers; and other houses that need not
be specified at any greater length, of the tailors, painters, and
brewers - this is probably the completest and most splendid example
of an ancient city market-square that now remains in Europe, and
absolutely without rival even in Belgium itself, though similar
old guild-houses, in the same delightful Flemish fashion, may
still be found (though in this case with admixture of many modern
buildings) in the Grande Place at Antwerp. It was in this splendid
square at Brussels that the unhappy Counts of Egmont and Horn were
brutally done to death, to glut the sinister tyranny of Spanish
Philip, on June 5, 1568.
Also, in addition to these two superlative antiquities, two modern
buildings in Brussels, though for widely different reasons, can
hardly be passed over under plea of lack of space. Crowning the
highest point of the city, and towering itself towards heaven in a
stupendous pile of masonry, is the enormous new Palais de Justice,
probably the most imposing law courts in the world. English Law
undoubtedly is housed with much greater modesty, though not
without due magnificence, in the altogether humbler levels of the
Strand. Also in the High Town - which is the modern quarter of
Brussels, in contrast with the mediaeval Low Town, which lies in
the flat below - is the Royal Museum of Ancient Paintings, which
probably divides honours with the Picture Gallery at Antwerp as
the finest and most representative collection of pictures of the
Netherlandish school in the world. Here you may revel by the hour
in a candlelight effect by Gerard Dow; in the poultry of Melchior
d'Hondecoeter; in a pigsty of Paul Potter's; in landscapes by
Meindert Hobbema; in a moonlight landscape of Van der Neer's; in a
village scene by Jan Steen; in the gallant world of Teniers; and
in the weird imaginings of Pieter Brueghel the younger.
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