St. Mariä Geburt in Kempen: A Gothic Hall Church in Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page27 sections
History
St. Mariä Geburt is a Catholic provost church in Kempen, Germany, built under the patronage of Gladbach Abbey around 1200. Its development from a Romanesque basilica into a Gothic hall church produced an unusually rich ecclesiastical complex on the Lower Rhine. The church belongs to the parish of St. Mariä Geburt Kempen in the Diocese of Aachen.
From basilica to vaulted church
The first church was a three-aisled basilica with a flat roof. Around 1240, it was converted into a vaulted basilica, a church with a raised central nave and lower side aisles whose upper walls contain windows. This phase established much of the building’s early Gothic character, including the masonry gables and the structural arrangement later altered by successive rebuilding.
A two-bay choir ending in five polygonal sides was added during the fourteenth century. Around 1400, the nave was raised and given new vaults, while a lower south aisle was constructed. These changes increased the scale of the church and prepared it for the more extensive reorganization that followed in the fifteenth century.
The fifteenth-century transformation
Several building phases in the fifteenth century changed the church into its present form. An arrangement resembling a pseudo-basilica was initially planned. In this type of church, the central nave rises above the side aisles but has no fully developed upper window zone. The higher eastern bay of the south aisle preserves evidence of that intention, although the project was ultimately completed as a hall church, with the nave and aisles brought to approximately equal height.
A two-storey entrance hall was built in the setback between the south aisle and the ambulatory, the passage surrounding the main choir. Between 1453 and 1460, the earlier Gothic choir was opened through and converted into an ambulatory choir. During the same broad phase, the north aisle was raised to the height of the nave. Work concluded in 1482–1490 with the construction of the sacristy on the north side of the choir.
The church’s furnishings grew alongside its medieval architecture. A three-seat celebrants’ chair was made in 1486, the choir stalls followed in 1492, and the Marian candelabrum was made in 1508. These works, together with sculpture and altarpieces from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, reflect the artistic connections of Kempen with the Lower Rhine and neighboring Meuse regions.
Early modern furnishings and later restoration
The church acquired three Antwerp altarpieces during the early sixteenth century. The Anne Altarpiece was commissioned by the Anne Brotherhood, a devotional confraternity dedicated to Saint Anne, from Adrian van Overbeck in Antwerp in 1513–1514. The altarpieces for the Saint James and Saint Anthony Altars date from after 1520, while the Marian Altarpiece was made in Antwerp around 1520. A Renaissance organ case was produced in Cologne in 1541 for an organ by Veit ten Bendt.
By the nineteenth century, an earlier and still richer furnishing scheme had been reduced. The church underwent comprehensive restoration from 1854 to 1876. This period also saw the Anne Altarpiece installed in the position of the high altar, where it remains part of the church’s liturgical arrangement. Several medieval works received new or supplemented polychromy during later interventions.
Wartime damage and reconstruction
From 1939 to 1942, major furnishings were removed for safekeeping, including the high altar, side altars, portions of the choir stalls, and the organ case. After a bomb destroyed a stained-glass window on 2 October 1942, the remaining late-nineteenth-century stained glass was also taken away. Bombing on 8 November 1944 destroyed the surviving windowpanes and several stone tracery elements.
On 2 March 1945, artillery fire and a bomb caused further damage. The pulpit pier and the roofs and vaults of the nave and south aisle were destroyed, and the exterior walls were damaged. An emergency roof was installed that year. Reconstruction from 1948 to 1958 restored the vaults and window tracery. The exterior was plastered and finished according to documented historic color schemes, while the evacuated furnishings had already been returned in 1945.
The interior was restored from 1990 to 1993, with a color scheme based on the investigation of the building. Between 1991 and 2002, the Renaissance organ case on the south gallery was reconstructed and supplemented with missing parts. The case was rebuilt according to a design by Cornelius H. Edskes, although a new organ mechanism had not yet been installed at that stage.
Remains
St. Mariä Geburt retains a tower, nave, north and south aisles, a choir with an ambulatory, a north transept, and a north-side sacristy. The ambulatory is slightly narrower than the side aisles. The building combines the remains of its early basilica with the raised, vaulted, and nearly unified interior created by the fifteenth-century hall-church transformation.
Exterior and structural fabric
Tower and west entrance
The tower is organized by vertical pilaster strips, round-arched friezes, and paired sound openings with twin arches. Its round-arched portal was renewed in the nineteenth century. Above the church, a tall slate-covered pyramidal spire rises from the masonry gables associated with the alterations around 1240. A continuous string course runs around the exterior of the nave and choir.
Roofs, gables, and ambulatory
The buttresses are covered by lean-to roofs. Individual hipped roofs cover the ambulatory, while the sacristy and north transept have cross-oriented gabled roofs above gables decorated with tracery, or ornamental geometric stonework. Before wartime destruction, the south aisle had a gabled roof and a masonry western gable. Reconstruction replaced this arrangement with cross roofs having hipped ends, set bay by bay.
Interior architecture
Nave and vaults
Rectangular arcade piers from the alterations around 1240 support ribbed cross-vaults, which are vaults carried by intersecting stone ribs. Engaged round shafts of trachyte carry the vaults, with groups of three shafts supporting the nave vaults. The cores of the original building’s piers survive, and capitals and other architectural fragments were reused during later alterations.
The pointed-arch panels in the clerestory were pierced when the hall church was created. Parts of the Romanesque basilica’s southern clerestory remain beneath the aisle roof. Pilaster strips and arch friezes organize the interior, whose architectural members have a pale-red finish with white painted joint lines.
Ambulatory and choir
The polygonal ambulatory walls are divided into two sections because the passage is covered by opposing three-ray vaults, each formed by three radiating ribs or rib groups. Their supporting piers obstruct sightlines toward the openings of the inner choir. The arrangement preserves the distinctive spatial consequences of converting the earlier choir into an ambulatory choir between 1453 and 1460.
Stained glass and wall painting
Side aisles and west tower
Most stained-glass windows in the side aisles depict the mysteries of the Rosary. The Hertel and Lersch workshop produced them between 1893 and 1900. On both sides of the west tower, windows made by Heinrich Dieckmann from 1935 to 1937 show the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary and the Madonna of the Protective Mantle, an image of Mary sheltering believers beneath her cloak.
Choir and north ambulatory
Wilhelm Geyer created the choir windows in 1967 around the theme of following Christ. The north ambulatory contains a badly damaged mural of Franciscan saints. A renewed inscription dates the painting to 1453. The mural relates the ambulatory to the church’s wider body of furnishings associated with the Franciscan order, a family of religious orders founded in the tradition of Saint Francis of Assisi.
Altarpieces and devotional sculpture
Anne Altarpiece
The Anne Altarpiece has occupied the place of the high altar since the nineteenth century. The Anne Brotherhood commissioned it from Adrian van Overbeck in Antwerp in 1513–1514 for the north chapel beside the tower. Its central shrine depicts the Holy Kinship, the family grouping centered on Saint Anne, Mary, and Christ. The shrine, predella, or lower altarpiece section, and inner wings contain scenes from Saint Anne’s life and from religious narratives drawn from the Apocrypha, the Legenda aurea, and an Anne legend published around 1500.
The upper decoration shows Saint Anne with her three legendary husbands, while the outer wings depict the Last Judgment. Ten additional panels on the rear of the shrine show scenes from the life of the Virgin. They were made at the same time as the main work, but not by Overbeck. The nineteenth-century polychromy was supplemented by the Krämer brothers.
Saint James and Saint Anthony Altarpiece
The Antwerp altarpiece for the Saint James and Saint Anthony Altars stands in the north aisle and dates from after 1520. Its nineteenth-century predella supports a shrine containing four scenes from the legend of James the Greater, two from the legend of Saint Lambert, and two from the life of Saint Anthony the Hermit. The left wing shows episodes from James’s life, while the right wing presents episodes from the life of Anthony. The crowning figure of Saint Anthony dates from the seventeenth century.
Marian Altarpiece
The Marian Altarpiece, made in Antwerp around 1520, stands in the south aisle. Its nineteenth-century predella supports a shrine with a Crucifixion and scenes from the life of the Virgin, including several renewed lower compartments. The body of the crucified Christ probably dates from the nineteenth century. The crowning figure of Saint George is probably an originally associated work.
The inner wings show Saints Roch, Cosmas, and Damian. The outer wings depict Saint Anthony the Hermit and Saint Sebastian, while the upper extension presents Saints George and Quirinus. Together, the three Antwerp altarpieces preserve a substantial group of carved and painted works whose central shrines and wings combine sculpture with narrative panels.
Other devotional images
A small domestic altar from Mechelen, made around 1510, contains a carved group of Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child. A Pietà made in Cologne around 1380 retains its figure of Mary, while the body of Christ has been lost. A walnut Madonna seated on a throne, venerated as a miraculous image and dating from around 1420–1440, was altered in the nineteenth century when the Child’s head and Mary’s left hand were added. Two Lower Rhine candle-bearing angels now flank it.
A Lower Rhine-Meuse figure of the enthroned Saint Peter dates from around 1480 and came from the Peter Gate. A larger-than-life figure of Saint Christopher from the Meuse region, dating from around 1480–1500, stands on an angel console. Peter of Wesel created a group of Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child in 1492, and its polychromy was restored in 1956. An outstanding crucifix from around 1525 is attributed to Heinrich Douvermann and is related to the crucifix in the Seven Sorrows Altarpiece at Saint Nicholas Church in Kalkar.
Figures of Saint Catherine and another female martyr date from the eighteenth century and probably retain their original polychromy. A war memorial by Gerhard Brüx, created in 1926, is also part of the furnishings.
Liturgical furnishings
Sacrament house and baptismal font
Konrad Kuyn made the tower-like sandstone sacrament house in 1460–1461. A block-like base supports the rectangular tabernacle enclosure, the compartment for the reserved Eucharist. Above it rises a two-storey tracery tower resembling goldsmiths’ work. Most of its figures were added later. The tabernacle displays the patrons of daughter parishes, the gablets show the Virgin Mary, Peter, and Paul, and the tracery tower presents Christ between angels carrying the Instruments of the Passion.
The baptismal font has a round basin of Namur blue stone, a dark limestone from the region of Namur, made around 1200. Its surface is decorated with heads and low-relief fantastic animals. The profiled octagonal foot belongs to the Late Gothic period.
Celebrants’ chair and choir stalls
The three-seat celebrants’ chair from 1486 bears the coat of arms of Hermann of Hesse, Archbishop of Cologne, and the town arms on its reverse. Its unpainted wood has finely worked open tracery, ornaments, and curtains represented through punched decoration.
Johannes Gruter made the double-row oak choir stalls in 1492. Their carved cheek-pieces show the four Church Fathers, major early Christian theologians, as standing figures, alongside the four marshals of the Archbishopric of Cologne: Anthony the Hermit, Hubertus, Cornelius, and Quirinus. Other cheek-pieces show kneeling angels with the Instruments of the Passion and the town arms. The misericords, small supports beneath folding choir seats, carry reliefs of Aesop’s animal fables and Lower Rhine proverbs.
Marian candelabrum
The elaborate Marian candelabrum was made in 1508 by the Master of the von Carben Memorial Foundation. Half-length angels serving as candle holders are attached to its wrought-iron arms. At the center, a double Madonna appears within a halo, with her crown held by two hovering angels.
Organs
Renaissance organ case
The valuable organ case on the south gallery comes from an organ made by Veit ten Bendt of Cologne in 1541. It is described as the only surviving Renaissance organ case in the Rhineland. Its three-towered upper section has a central tower resting on a horse console and side towers supported by bearded heads. The carved panels of the base are decorated with arabesques and head medallions in the manner of Heinrich Aldegrever.
Only the four panels beneath the cornice remain in their original position. Other panels were reassembled after alterations and losses, and the original polychromy has disappeared. From 1991 to 2002, Cologne restorers Röthinger and von Welck reconstructed and completed the case according to Cornelius H. Edskes’s design.
Present organ
The present organ was made by the Albiez company in 1979. It has 45 stops distributed across three manuals and pedal, with couplers I/II, III/I, III/II, I/P, II/P, and III/P.
