The church of St. Gudule, which is the most remarkable at Brussels, has two huge gothic towers, each nearly the same height with St. Pauls, and from their solid and massy construction looking even more stupendous; but the effect is seriously injured by a number of ordinary houses, which have been permitted to be erected against the very walls of the building!—a curious instance of the absence of all taste in the ecclesiastical body, who can thus permit, for money, the actual defacement of their finest building. The pillars which sustain the roof within, bear each in front a colossal statue, of which there are fourteen or sixteen representing the various saints and apostles, some of them by Duquesnoy and Quellyn, but the generality of inferior merit. The pulpit was carved by Van Bruggen in 1699, and was presented to the cathedral by the Empress Maria Theresa.
The windows which are of dimensions proportioned to the huge scale of the church are all of rich stained glass, partly antique and partly of modern execution, but of great brilliancy of tint and high talent in design. The high altar is so composed by some ingenious machinery within, that the sacred wafer descends apparently of itself, at the moment when the host is about to be elevated by the officiating priest.
Around the choir are the monuments of some of the ancient Dukes of Brabant, surmounted by their effigies in armour, with swords and helmets disposed by their side; that of John II, who married Margaret of England, and died in 1318, bears a figure of the Belgic lion in gilded bronze, which weighs nearly three tons. Opposite this is another to the memory of the Archduke Ernest of Austria, on which rests a figure clad in mail. Close by it a marble slab in the floor covers the vault in which are interred some members of the imperial family who died during their vice-royalty at Brussels.
One statue in St. Gudule is remarkable as a favourable specimen of modern art in Belgium, it is that of the Count Frederick de Merode, a young nobleman of most amiable personal character, whose father was of one of the ancient families of Brabant, and his mother a Grammont. On the outburst of the revolution in 1830, he returned from France, where he was residing, enrolled himself as a volunteer in a corps of sharpshooters raised by the Marquis de Chasteler, and was killed whilst leading a charge against the Dutch rear-guard, under the command of Duke Bernard of Saxe Weimar. This monument is by Geefs of Brussels, who has evinced equal judgment and ability in retaining the national blouse as the costume of his statue, and yet so disposing it as to render it perfectly classical by his arrangement. Geefs is by far the most distinguished artist, as a sculptor, in Belgium, and has recently erected a spirited statue of General Belliard in the Park overlooking the Rue Royale, and the grand monument over the remains of the revolutionary partisans, who fell in the three glorious days “of 1830,” and are interred in the centre of the Place des Martyrs.
The other churches of Brussels contain little that is worth a visit. In that of Notre Dame de la Chapelle, there is a high altar from a design by Rubens, one of those works in which he has so profusely exhibited his astonishing command of arabesque and allegorical devices. The pulpit is another specimen of wood carving, representing Elijah fed by ravens. It is remarkable that in all the churches of Brussels, there is not a single painting of more than common place ability, nor a single specimen of either Vandyck or Rubens—painters, it would seem, like prophets, are to seek for their patrons at some distance from home.
The municipal collections of art are deposited in the museum and picture gallery in the Palais des Beaux Arts, formerly the vice-regal residence of the Austrian governors. In one wing of the building, called the Palais d’Industrie, are deposited models of machinery, agricultural instruments, and inventions of all kinds applicable to manufactures. The collection is costly and extensive, and cannot fail to exercise a beneficial influence in the education of mechanics. The main galleries of the palace are filled with the national pictures, which amount to between three and four hundred. The description of a painting is scarcely more intelligible or satisfactory than the description of an overture. Amongst the collection are a few of considerable merit, but the vast majority are of the most ordinary description. There are a few by Rubens and Vandyck, not of the first order, some by Breughel, Cuyp, Gerard Dow, and the chiefs of that school; a multitude by the Crayers and Van Oorts and Vander Weydes, whose works one meets in every Flemish chapel, and a number of the early painters of the Netherlands, in which, I confess, I am not connoisseur enough to discover anything very attractive beyond their antiquity and curiosity as specimens of the feeble efforts of art in its infancy.
Under the same roof is the magnificent Library, begun by the Dukes of Burgundy so far back as the fourteenth century, and enriched by every subsequent sovereign of the Netherlands, till its treasures now amount to 150,000 volumes of printed books and 15,000 manuscripts; amongst which are numbers whose pedigree through their various possessors is full of historical interest, and some which belonged to the library of Philip the Hardy, in 1404, and described in the “Inventoire des livres et roumans de feu Monseigneur (Philip le Hardi), a qui Dieu pardonne, que maistre Richart le Conte, barbier de feu le dict Seigneur, a euzen garde.” Its chief treasures it owes, however, to Philip the Good, the Lorenzo de Medicis of the Low Countries, who attracted to his court such geniuses as Oliver de la March, Monstrelet, Philip de Commines, the chroniclers and men of learning of his time, and kept constantly in his employment the most able “clerks,” “escripvains” and illuminators, engaged in the preparation of volumes for his “librarie,” and having united all the provinces of the Netherlands under his dominion, he collected at Brussels the manuscripts of the Counts of Flanders, in addition to his own. The identical copy of the Cyropedia of Xenophon, which he had transcribed for the study of his impetuous son, Charles le Téméraire, and which accompanied him to the disastrous field of Morat, is still amongst the deposits in this superb collection.
Another of its illustrious founders was Margaret of Austria, la gente demoiselle, daughter to the gentle-spirited Mary of Burgundy, and friend of Erasmus and Cornelius Agrippa, who amassed for it the invaluable collection of “Princeps” editions, which were then issuing from the early press of Venice and the North. The Library still contains the common-place book of this interesting Princess, with her verses in her own handwriting, and music of her own composition.
Another equally charming guardian of literature was her niece, Mary of Austria, the sister of Charles V and Queen Dowager of Hungary, who transferred to the library of Brussels the manuscripts which her husband, Louis II, had inherited from his grandfather, Mathias Corvinus. Amongst these, is a missal, one of the wonders of the collection, painted at Florence in 1485, and abounding in the most exquisite miniatures, arabesques and illuminated cyphers. From the period of its deposit in Brussels, the Dukes of Brabant took their oath of inauguration by kissing the leaves of this priceless volume, and two pages which had been opened for this purpose at the accession of Albert and Isabella, in November 1599, are spotted with the flakes of snow which fell upon the book during the solemnity.
In the vicissitudes of Brussels, the contents of her Library has always been an object of cupidity for her invaders. In 1746, Marshal Saxe sent a selection of its treasures to Paris, which were restored in 1770, and again seized by the revolutionary army of Dumourier in 1794, and though recovered in 1815, it was with the loss of many of its precious deposits. But even the disappearance of these was less exasperating than the insensate vandalism of the savants of the revolution, who actually rubbed out with their wetted fingers, the portraits of the ancient emperors and kings, and even of the saints who happened to wear a crown, in order to evince their inexpressible hatred of monarchy.