Heart of Europe

by Ralph Adams Cram

BRUGES, HÔTEL DE VILLE

combining the restraint and the simplicity of early Gothic with the exquisite ornament and the sense of decorative beauty of the latest Gothic, it is not of record. It seems to come at the mid-most point, when everything met together, without loss and without exaggeration, for the production of a living example of what society is capable when it achieves a perfect, if unenduring, equilibrium. It is a masterpiece of architectural composition, of brilliant and supremely intelligent design, while it is vivified by a poetry and an inspiration that exist only at a few crowning moments in history. Even now it is one of the loveliest buildings in Europe; what it must have been once, when its fifty statues, each under its crocketed canopy (they also were pulled down and hammered in pieces during the French Revolution), its tracery, balustrades, and pinnacles were blazing with colour and gilding, passes the imagination. It is only a small building of six bays subdivided by its three turrets into two triple groups with a doorway in each. The composition is very subtle and quite original, while the design is emphasised vertically, there being no horizontal members which run through from end to end, though the levels are very delicately indicated by window mullions, niches, panels, traceried arches, and the crowning parapet. It is one of the least obvious of architectural compositions and, I am disposed to think, one of the best. While it lacks the Doric simplicity of Ypres, it has a sensitive rhythm and a richness of light and shade without studied intricacy or premeditated theatricalism that places it amongst the few very perfect works of art. It is a “poetic” composition in the highest sense, or rather it is akin to music of the mode that followed the Gregorian and opened up new possibilities of a more complex, if no more poignant, spiritual expression. It is perhaps the most perfect single piece of architecture in Belgium, and if it is extinguished in the night of Armageddon we lose a thing of inestimable value, unequalled, irreplaceable, even as we have lost that equally inestimable spiritual force that brought it into existence.

The “Halles” also, with their famous “Belfry of Bruges” are a particularly noble example of the same period of artistic supremacy, though they lack consistency, for only the lower stages of the amazing tower are original, this portion of the work being completed about 1296. All the upper part is of the very end of the fifteenth century, and the octagonal upper stage is of no high order of design. Once this also was crowned by a slender spire having a statue of St. Michael sixteen feet high, which must have brought the stupendous erection almost to a height of five hundred feet, for even now the topmost balustrade is three hundred and fifty-two feet above the street. Ten years after the spire was finished it was destroyed by lightning, rebuilt, destroyed again, and then left in its present condition.

Brussels followed Bruges, and its huge City Hall was begun about 1404. Compared with Arras, Bruges, or Louvain, it is dry and somewhat unimaginative, with a curious modern look that may, in part, be due to very drastic restorations and to the devilish ingenuity in destruction of the French Revolutionists. In the beginning, however, it failed in subtle proportions, and in point of composition as well. Its belfry, graceful as it is, is thin and artificial in effect, while the façade is formal without the grave majesty of Ypres, rich without the sensitive refinement of Bruges or the riotous exuberance of Louvain. This is not to condemn it as bad; except for the supreme qualities of the three monuments last mentioned it would stand high in the architectural scale, but it is impossible to avoid comparisons, and through these it suffers, perhaps unjustly.

Less than fifty years after Brussels came Louvain, and so far as good art is concerned the three-quarters of a century since Bruges has not been altogether well spent. As in the case of religious architecture, an ungoverned passion for beauty and craftsmanship has resulted in the destruction of the sane and noble balance in such churches as Reims, such civic halls as Bruges and Ypres, while nothing is left but an almost impossible luxuriance, as of a northern flower forced in the hot, moist air of a greenhouse. The Hôtel de Ville of Louvain, spared by some inconsequent and unnatural whim of those who wrecked all the city around and gave over the priceless libraries of the university to the flames, is one of the smallest of its kind in Belgium; it is only one hundred and thirteen feet long, forty-one feet wide, and seventy feet to the level of its parapet—about the dimensions, let us say, of an average New York dwelling of the better class. It is less a building than an ornament—a shrine, a tabernacle for the sanctuary of a cathedral. You feel that you want to take it up and polish it, you regard it as you do an ivory carving from Pekin,

THE HÔTEL DE VILLE OF LOUVAIN