Antwerp, Flanders, Belgium
Arriving in Antwerp on Sunday morning, I faced a dilemma.
All the museums are closed on Mondays, so I’d have to prioritize the ones I wanted
to see and go to all of them on Sunday. Considering that the KMSKA (Koninklijk
Museum voor Schone Konsten Antwerp), the primary art museum in Antwerp, is closed
for a few years for renovations that’s not as hard as it might sound since most
of the other art museums in town are small. Many of KMSKA’s main art works are exhibited
elsewhere in museums and churches around the city during the renovations,
though, and I did visit it when I was in Antwerp for a day in 2002.
Antwerp is the city most closely associated with the
Northern Baroque in art with Peter Paul Rubens its most famous native son. The
city blossomed as a trading center in the 1500s and 1600s after Bruges and
Ghent started to decline. Antwerp’s “Golden Age” roughly coincides with that of
Holland, but the art differs significantly in that United Provinces of the
Netherlands was Protestant and an independent nation at the time while Antwerp remained
both Catholic and still under Hapsburg (Spanish) rule after a brief era of
Reformation iconoclasm in the city. As a consequence, Belgium nowadays still
has far more ornate churches than the Netherlands, and religious art remained a
more prominent genre in Antwerp than in the Netherlands during that era.
One of Antwerp’s main museums, the Plantin-Moretus House
Museum is actually listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Kind of odd for a
museum, huh? The place is actually quite extensive and includes the workshops
of a printing complex that was Europe’s most important publishing house during
the latter half of the 16th century. The printing press may have
been invented almost a century earlier, but Plantin’s workshop made great advances
in typography and processes and was arguably the world’s first true academic
publisher of religious and scientific texts. The place is pretty interesting.
The second notable Antwerp Museum is the Mayer Van den
Bergh, the private collection of a late 19th century art dealer and collector
of mostly Dutch and Flemish renaissance and baroque art. The museum is considered
one of Europe’s best small art museums housing an individual’s private
collection, sort of like a Belgian Isabella Stuart Gardner. Unfortunately,
though, “Dolle Griet” (Mad Meg) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, one of his
greatest masterpieces and the most famous painting in the museum, is being
restored and wasn’t on display.
Antwerp’s most famous artist is, or course, Peter Paul
Rubens, so its not surprising that the Rubens House and Studio is one of the most
visited places in Antwerp. The place is actually huge and has about 50 rooms
containing artworks of the era, not all of them by Rubens. Rubens is known for
his huge paintings full of chubby woman, many with royal and religious themes.
And it seems like almost every significant museum around the world has several
in not multiple enormous paintings of his. How did one guy paint all that? Monet painted thousands of paintings, but
they were small and impressionistic and many of the same theme, but Rubens are
varied and huge. Well, Rubens had a
whole workshop of painters who he oversaw and quite a successful businessman.
Chances are most square inches of most paintings attributed to Rubens around
the world are not directly of the master’s hand but by apprentices in his
studio.
The last of the Antwerp’s four small art museums is the Rockox-Snyders
House Museum, the adjoining houses of a wealthy burgher, collector, and Antwerp
mayor Nicolaas Rockox and the bost-known Flemish baroque painter specializing
still lifes and animals, Frans Snyders. With many of works from the KMSKA on
display, it was one of the best exhibitions of paintings of the genre that I’ve
seen anywhere.
2025-05-22