Central Antwerp’s classical art collections and churches will not disappoint – after all, this is the main city of Flanders, a region that later came to be known as the Italy of the North for its excellence in the arts. How could they disappoint when dwellers of this very city included some of the world’s top greatest producing artists, Van Dyck, Jordaens, Breugel. Not to mention Rubens, one of the most fertile and accomplished of the Old Masters of his generation – his workshop produced 2,200 paintings – he remains one of the most artists, equally comfortable as a superb Baroque painter of large format canvases, religious as well as mythological, instantly recognizable by their bold color and deliberate complexity, and as a painter of assertive sketches and studies. This Renaissance man was extremely connected and influential, and was widely respected by contemporaries as a humanist, man of letters, and erudite who spoke seven languages. An admirer of the printed book and the built environment, Rubens was a graphic designer and book illustrator who produced exquisite drawings and engravings, and proved himself a most able architect. Following his stay in Rome, where he studied under Annibale Carracci, and his return by way of Genoa, where he experienced first hand the architectonic sophistication of modern domestic palazzi of the nobility, Rubens became a classically educated Italianizer – a supporter of Greco-Roman beautification of Flanders, an exponent of bringing what was known as the Italian taste, genius for form, and mastery of composition to Flanders where a highly developed native art school already prospered – while remaining a forceful exporter of Flemish artistic refinement to the courts of Spain, England, France, and throughout Europe. The opposite of Rembrandt, his great contemporary admirer, a genius of the bourgeois, almost plebeian, art from the more individualistic United Provinces in the North, Rubens was knighted by kings of Spain, the leading power of the preceding century, and of England, the rising leading power of the next one.
The world’s top repositories of Fine Arts are indebted to private collections of Flemish Old Masters – from Catherine the Great’s series of sizable acquisitions of his works from the 1760’s that started St Petersburg’s Hermitage to collections of Rubens by Archduke Leopold William at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, by Prince Lichtenstein at Vienna’s Lichtenstein Museum, by Count Lamberg, Austria’s ambassador to Turin and Naples, at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts he founded, and by Duke Albert of Saxony who founded Vienna’s Albertina, the world’s largest museum of graphic art. His legacy – a Rubens Hall and a Flemish Wing are fixtures of Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, the Louvre, Washington’s National Gallery, and nearly all top notch museums – helped propel these great museums to their current status. Despite losing important works here and there during the 18th century to the city’s remote masters like Austria and France, Antwerp has an entire museum dedicated to Rubens and large collections of old Flemish masters, and there are plenty of works by these artists in the churches throughout the city. Similar to other Art Cities (Paris and Vienna do a spectacular job with this event), Antwerp opens the doors and riches of at least two dozen of its museums, Stadhuis and other venues late into the night on Museumnacht in August, drawing in a younger and more local crowd.
Some of Antwerp’s legacy of top notch art is in its churches. In the 1620s, the Augustinian order commissioned Rubens, Jordaens, and Van Dyck, Antwerp’s top three Baroque artists, at the same time to work on its church altars on Kammenstraat next to the former early baroque monastery that today hosts AMUZ, a concert hall. The most recognizable city symbol, the High Brabant Gothic Cathedral of Our Lady, a UNESCO World Heritage site, known for the elaborate stone lacework of its belfry and spire, for its spatially and sculpturally complex interior with seven aisles is worth a look, it houses significant paintings by Rubens. Former Jesuit St Charles Borromeo church on Hendrik Conscience square a few blocs down a pedestrian lane from Grote Markt is a late baroque masterpiece. Modeled after Il Gesu in Rome like many other Jesuit churches of the late 1500’s and early 1600’s across Europe, only – surprise, surprise – more ornate than most, this facade in the transitional Mannerist style opens up abruptly in its pre-modern setting, visible fully only form the enclosed square in front of it, thanks to the building of Flanders Heritage Library that blocks the view of the church from the street. Rubens himself, a student of Rome and a fan of Genoa, contributed to the facade design, produced 39 ceiling paintings, destroyed by fire in early 1700’s, a number of his paintings behind the high altar and in side chapels, add to the interior richly ornamented with marble and gold. The Gothic interiors of the Dominican Sint Pauluskerk located North of Grote Markt on the way to the port are rich in Baroque sculpture and boast paintings by Rubens, Jordanes, Van Dyck, Cornelis de Vos. St Andrew’s church close to the fashion district, redone in the 17th century in the Mannerist style by Martin de Vos, and Sint Jakobskerk, with its Gothic exterior and Baroque interior and planned to surpass the Cathedral in height but never completed, are also worth a visit.
Antwerp’s formula for a bespoke museum is a residential palazzo with a courtyard that doubled up as the artist’s studio. There is more to Antwerp’s museum scene than the impeccably restored Rubenshuis from Antwerp’s Golden Age is the Italianate residence and studio where the city’s most famous son lived and worked – the menu of options includes the MAS Museum, which hosts half a million pieces on the history of the city, the MoMu designer and historical fashion museum with its inspiring Copyright, an art & architecture bookshop , the Rockox House in a 17th century patrician residence on Kaizerstraat with important works by a pretty much the same lineup of top names, Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens, Breugel, Martin de Vos. The Vleeshuis Museum hosts a collection of musical instruments and bell carillons in the historic and near picture perfect butchers’ guild hall behind the Stadhuis where dozens of butchers sold meat for three centuries, the nearby Museum de Reede has a collection of paper lithographs and engravings by Goya, Munch, and others.
Of special interest is the Plantin-Moretus Museum, a 400 year old printing house and mansion that served as the residence of Europe’s most important and famous bookmaker, Christopher Plantin, who left Paris in mid 1500’s for Antwerp to become Europe’s first industrial printer and the Archtypographer of Philip II. This mansion contains the world’s oldest printing presses, family portraits signed by Rubens, and a major collection of rare books celebrating 16th century Antwerp’s book printing industry when the city was home to almost 100 printing houses or close to one per 1,000 of inhabitants and held a 50%+ share of all publishing in the Netherlands. I have seen references to Plantin and Moretus as 16th century Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg – whether such comparisons, inspired by their role in revolutionizing communications of the day, is an exaggeration or not, the mansion of the world’s first industrialized printers is a UNESCO World Heritage site by itself. Antwerp’s massive publishing of printed books – ecclesiastical texts, pocket editions of classics, contemporary humanist and academic publications, and educational texts, in Latin, Hebrew and many other languages – was on a scale of production and employment of presses and people that had no equal in Europe at the time. International and well connected, Antwerp’s printers maintained close connections with rivals, professors and royal counselors across European cities, universities and courts, its book binding industry playing an important role in the propagation of ideas and intellectual development of Renaissance Europe, its draftsmen and engravers equally important to kicking off Europe’s age of map making.
