The Story of Brussels

by Ernest Gilliat-Smith

Notre-Dame de la Chapelle

The Church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle has been for many centuries[33] what it still is, a simple parish church, the parish church of a district which has never been a rich one, and which, when the foundation stone was laid, and for more than three centuries afterwards, was the poorest quarter of the city. In those days this stately structure towered high above the squalid huts of turf or wood which the weavers called their homes; fires were frequent then, and in the great conflagration of 1405, which destroyed fourteen hundred houses, the old sanctuary, where so many generations of downtrodden toilers had brought their woes and grievances to the throne of the Most High, was all but burnt down. The choir and transepts were not so injured as to be past reparation, but the nave and the aisles and the tower were wholly destroyed, and it was decided to rebuild them in such a fashion that the poor man's church should be second to none in the city. For something like fifty years they laboured at it, and when at last the work was completed, not even the great collegiate Church of Saint Michael and Saint Gudule was more lovely than the chapel in the weavers' quarter. Saint Gudule's was

NOTRE-DAME DE LA CHAPELLE.

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of course, a larger church than Notre-Dame, but in those days the difference in size of the two buildings was not so great as it is at present: Saint Gudule's has waxed both in size and beauty since then, as we shall presently see, and Notre-Dame has waned. Villeroi shattered the spire in 1695, and some forty years before, two very beautiful side chapels on the north of the chancel were made one, which is not beautiful, and perhaps, too, when the church was restored after the French bombardment, the arrangement of the roof was altered: the more recent portion of the building is very considerably higher than the earlier work, and the junction is not very happily effected, at all events as seen from the exterior. This can hardly have been the original arrangement, unless, indeed, it was only regarded as a temporary one, with a view later on to the reconstruction of the transepts and the chancel, in the same style and on the same magnificent scale as the rest of the building. If this were the original plan of the architect, and if it had been successfully carried out, Brussels would have been possessed of the chef-d'œuvre of Brabant architecture, but on the other hand she would have lost a very beautiful specimen of early transition work, perhaps the most beautiful in the Low Countries.

The plan of the nave of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle is very similar to that of the Sablon, but it is a longer and broader and higher building, the columns are bolder, the mouldings richer, and the capitals are more elaborately and more delicately carved. If the Sablon church could be re-invested with the gold and colour which, we believe, it originally possessed, its glory would be outshone by the greater glory of the bare walls and the white windows of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle. For this church, too, has been scraped, and no vestige of its ancient stained glass remains. The old story: the Calvinist, the whitewasher, and the restorer. There are still, however, some faint traces of fresco work: there is a ruddy glow on one of the massive columns which separate the south transept from the outer south aisle, which, if one steadily gazes at it, presently assumes the shape of an aureoled figure draped in crimson robes; and here and there on the walls there are large patches of a delicate hue, like the tint of faded rose leaves. At first one imagines that they are patches of that beautiful pink stone—a species of porphyry—with which so many of the churches in the Rhine Valley are built, between Mainz and Coblenz, but on closer inspection it will be found that they are remnants of mural painting.

The removal of the whitewash from this church took place at a sufficiently distant date for that cunning illuminator, Time, who works swiftly nowadays in our smoky northern cities, to accomplish something in the Church of Notre Dame of which he need not be ashamed. The glacis with which he has enamelled the bare stone in nave and aisle and transept, if it is not as brilliant as the blue, the vermilion, the burnished gold with which John van Eyck or Roger Van der Weyden would have adorned it, is at least more beautiful and more lasting than the pigments which would have been employed if any modern master-painter had taken the matter in hand.

There are two rare and striking features in this building to which we would draw the reader's notice: the triforium, perhaps the most perfect existing expression of the Brabant architect's ideal of what a triforium should be; and the clustered cylindrical columns beneath the tower, which itself forms, as is the case in most Brabant churches, the first bay of the nave. The treatment of these columns constitutes almost a reversion to the method of treating grouped columns during the first period of Gothic architecture. Each group consists of a central column of the same form and dimensions as the columns which support the other bays of the nave, and four columns attached to it of like form, but more slender. This method of treating groups of columns, though not so rare in Brabant as in England in third period work, is nevertheless

NOTRE-DAME AU-DELÀ DE LA DYLE.

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sufficiently uncommon, albeit groups of this kind are occasionally to be met with even in the latest Gothic work. Witness the group in the chancel of Notre-Dame au-delà de la Dyle at Mechlin.

Symmetry, simplicity, unity, these are the most striking characteristics of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle: the great cylindrical pillars on each side of the central avenue are all made after the same model, the clustered columns which separate the inner from the outer aisles are alike, nearly every capital throughout the building is carved in one fashion, triforium answers to triforium, spandrel to spandrel, arch to arch, each window, alike in aisle and clerestory, beholds in the window opposite the reflection almost of its own fair face. And yet in crystallising the child of his fancy, the designer of this church was able to impress his handiwork with the charm of the picturesque. How did he accomplish this feat? Artist as he was to his finger-tips—all architects were artists in those days, and this man was surely the first of his craft—he knew very well that if a building were perfectly and geometrically symmetrical it would be as cold and as stiff and as lifeless as a statue designed under similar conditions, and he subtly introduced into his ground plan a modicum of irregularity: he made the western bay of his central avenue slightly narrower than the three succeeding bays, these of like dimensions, and the fifth and the last, which are not equal to one another, each of them a trifle broader. The discrepancies are so minute that they are not at first sight perceptible, but their influence extends, it goes without saying, to every part of the building. Further, such was his sublime contempt for the sacrosanct law of precision, that he ventured on something bolder still: he determined not to make the central line of his nave the true central line of the building; in other words, that each of the northern aisles should be narrower than the corresponding aisle on the other side of the church. And here again the dissimilarity is imperceptible, and that, though the difference in width of the inner aisles is something like two feet, and in the case of the outer aisles no less than four feet seven inches.

Most impressive is the view of the nave as one stands beneath the chancel arch, no less pleasing is the view athwart the church as seen from the baptistery chapel with the face turned towards the south-east, but choose what coign of vantage you will, and you shall behold visions of loveliness.