Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal: Antwerp’s Gothic Cathedral
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- High
- Country
- Belgium
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Duchy of Brabant, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page23 sections
History
Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Antwerp, Belgium, dedicated to Mary and serving as the mother church of the Diocese of Antwerp. Built in the Brabantine Gothic tradition, the present church took shape mainly between 1352 and 1521, with construction continuing in various forms until 1616. It is also a pilgrimage site associated with Our Lady of Antwerp and became one of the defining religious and artistic landmarks of the city.
From Marian chapel to parish church
A chapel dedicated to Mary stood on the site from the ninth to the twelfth century. In 1124 it became a parish church and was replaced by a Romanesque building about 80 metres long and 42 metres wide. Archaeological excavations in the 1980s clarified the plan of this earlier church. Its nave remained in use beside the new Gothic construction until the Romanesque building was demolished in 1469.
The Gothic building campaign
Work on the present cathedral began in 1352. The project was intended to create the largest Gothic church in Belgium and one of the largest in the Low Countries. Jan Appelmans, who came from Boulogne, served as the first principal builder and worked on the cathedral for about four decades. His son Pieter Appelmans succeeded him. Other builders involved in the long campaign included Jan Tac, Master Evrard, Herman de Waghemakere, Dominikus de Waghemakere, and Rombout II Keldermans.
The choir was completed in 1415, the nave in 1487, and work on the transept continued until 1495. By 1518 the northern tower had reached its fourth level. In 1521, Herman and Dominikus de Waghemakere began an enlargement that would have added two outer aisles and a larger choir surrounded by radial chapels. The scheme was never completed. A fire on the night of 5–6 October 1533 seriously damaged the cathedral and redirected labour and money away from the enlargement and the southern tower. The building had also suffered a fire in 1434.
The original plan called for two towers of equal height. Antwerp financed the northern tower, while the parish was responsible for the southern one. Financial problems, religious conflict, and the 1533 fire prevented the southern tower from rising beyond its third level. Construction activity continued in some form until 1616, leaving the cathedral with an unfinished southern tower and a completed northern spire.
Religious upheaval and changing status
Antwerp became a diocese in 1559, and the church was elevated to cathedral status, meaning that it became the principal church of the diocese and the seat of its bishop. During the Iconoclasm of 20 August 1566, a wave of Protestant attacks in the Low Countries, much of the cathedral’s interior decoration was destroyed. Further losses followed under Protestant administration in 1581, when works were destroyed, erased, confiscated, or sold. Catholic authority returned after Antwerp came back under Catholic rule in 1585.
The cathedral was looted and extensively damaged by French revolutionaries in 1794. Around 1798, the French administration planned to demolish it, but intervention by Napoleon saved the building. Napoleon later provided funds for restoration and expressed appreciation for its Gothic architecture. The cathedral lost its status during the French-period reorganisation in 1803 and regained it in 1961.
Restoration, art, and heritage
Several important works removed to Paris were returned in 1816 after the Congress of Vienna, including three major paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. The cathedral was extensively restored and refurnished during the nineteenth century, with work directed in part by Frans Andries Durlet. Another major restoration campaign took place from 1965 to 1993. The exterior of the northern belfry was restored between 2019 and December 2022; its clock faces, weather vane, and cross were restored and regilded, and the weather vane returned to the spire in October 2020.
The northern tower forms part of the UNESCO World Heritage inscription for the Belfries of Belgium and France. It entered the inscription in 1999 under criteria (ii) and (iv), and the inscription was expanded in 2005. The tower remains under the authority of Antwerp’s city council rather than the cathedral chapter.
Music and worship
The cathedral became an important centre of Antwerp’s musical life from the early fifteenth century. Johannes Ockeghem served there as a vicar in 1443, and Jacob Obrecht held the same office from 1492 to 1497. Organists included Henry Bredemers, John Bull, Jacobus Barbireau, and Andreas Pevernage.
The documented history of the cathedral choir begins in 1382. The choir was repeatedly dispersed and re-established, including during wartime. It was reorganised in 1927, expanded into an adult as well as children’s choir in 1971, and joined by a girls’ choir founded in 1985. The musical tradition continues through the choirs, organs, and carillons, coordinated sets of tuned bells played from a keyboard.
Two historical carillons once hung in the towers. The city carillon was made by the Hemony brothers between 1655 and 1658, while a chapter or church carillon was made between 1654 and 1655. After the Second World War, surviving bells from the latter were lent to the church of Hoogstraten. Some later returned, while six remained in the cathedral as ringing bells.
Remains
Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal is a large cross-shaped church with seven aisles, a transept, a deep choir, and an outer ambulatory ending in an apse surrounded by five chapels. The interior is about 119 metres long, while the building’s stated overall width is about 76 metres and its floor area about 8,000 square metres. The transept extends approximately 67 metres. Brick and white sandstone form most of the structure, including sandstone from Dilbeek and white Balegem sandstone in the northern tower. Durable timber, particularly oak, was used for the roof and its supporting structure.
Gothic structure and towers
Interior plan
The cathedral’s interior represents an innovative form of Brabantine Gothic, the regional Gothic tradition associated with elaborate stonework, expansive church interiors, and complex tracery. Large profiled clustered piers divide the aisles and continue directly into the vault ribs without intervening capitals. The central nave has exceptionally wide pointed arches. In place of a triforium, a middle-level gallery traditionally found above the main arcade, the church has a band of pierced tracery and reliefs. The central nave vault rises 27.5 metres, the nave reaches about 40 metres, and the lantern vault reaches approximately 43 metres.
West front and entrances
The west facade faces Handschoenmarkt, the south entrance faces Groenplaats, and the north entrance faces Torfbrug. The west facade includes a tympanum, a decorated triangular field above an entrance, depicting the Last Judgment. Jan-Baptist van Wint made this relief in 1903. The entrance area also contains a large three-level Last Judgment relief and a representation of the Ark of the Covenant. Nearby are nine confessionals beneath dark wood panelling, accompanied by figures of the twelve apostles and twelve female figures.
Northern tower
The northern tower rises approximately 123 metres and contains the clock, ringing bells, and a large carillon. Its lower construction had reached the fourth level by 1518, and its openwork Flamboyant Gothic spire was completed between 1521 and 1530. Flamboyant Gothic is the highly decorative later phase of the style, recognised here in the spire’s open stonework and intricate geometric forms. The tower staircase has about 515 steps and the tower’s stonework includes white Balegem sandstone.
Southern and lantern towers
The southern tower rises about 65.3 metres and stops at its third level. Built at parish expense, it was never raised further and has a short pinnacle above its unfinished upper section. An octagonal lantern tower stands over the crossing. Built in the sixteenth century to bring additional light into the enlarged interior, it has three receding stages crowned by a bulbous dome.
Chapels, tombs, and devotional works
Marian sculpture
A fourteenth-century Carrara-marble Madonna and Child, associated with the Meuse-region workshop tradition, stands on the first pier of the left-hand aisles. The Gothic statue is about 1.27 metres high and was placed in the cathedral in 1866. The Chapel of Our Lady contains the wooden statue of Our Lady of Antwerp, which dates from the sixteenth century and was already in the church before the Iconoclasm of 1566.
Chapels and altars
The late-Rococo Ark of the Covenant prayer chapel is associated with the Brotherhood of the Blessed Sacrament. Made under the supervision of Judocus Ignatius Picavet, it includes work by Hendrik Frans Verbruggen and Henricus II de Potter. The Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament also contains a gilded-copper tabernacle designed by Hendrik Frans Verbruggen in 1710, with side reliefs by Judocus Ignatius Picavet from 1712 and a facing relief by Henricus II de Potter from 1753.
The choir contains Neogothic stalls made by François Durlet in 1841. Their high-relief carvings depict scenes from the life of Mary. In the Chapel of the Crown stands Artus Quellinus the Elder’s polychrome Mater Dolorosa. Since 2018, the chapel has also displayed Javier Pérez’s glass crown of thorns, made from Murano glass in 2011 and set on a red cushion above a slender bronze pedestal.
Tombs and earlier remains
The black stone floor is inlaid with tomb slabs of white marble. Among the cathedral’s memorials are the tomb of Isabella of Bourbon, a monument to Isabella of Burgundy, and the white, black, and red marble tomb of Bishop Mario Ambrosius Capello by Artus Quellinus the Younger. The ambulatory also contains a marble relief of angels around the Mystic Press by Quellinus, a grisaille Visitation and Marriage of the Virgin by Mathieu Ignace Van Bree, and remnants of the former altar enclosure of the Coppers, made by Guillielmus Ignatius Kerricx in 1683.
The ambulatory provides access to fragments of walls and sarcophagi belonging to the earlier church. A fragment of a fresco depicting the Suffering Christ survives in the sacristy, together with portraits of Antwerp bishops from 1602 onward.
Paintings and furnishings
Rubens triptychs
Peter Paul Rubens’s Raising of the Cross is a triptych painted in 1610 for the former Church of Saint Walburga and transferred to the cathedral in 1816. Its central panel measures about 4.60 by 3.40 metres, while each side panel is approximately 4.60 by 1.50 metres.
Rubens’s Descent from the Cross has a central panel completed in 1612 and side panels added later. The central panel measures about 4.21 by 3.11 metres, and the side panels approximately 4.21 by 1.53 metres. Two paintings from the series were taken to France on Napoleon’s orders and returned in the nineteenth century.
Rubens’s smaller Resurrection of Christ, dated 1612, measures about 1.38 by 1.98 metres in its central panel, with side panels approximately 1.38 by 0.40 metres. Martina Plantin commissioned it as an epitaph for herself and her husband, Jan Moretus, whose portraits appear on the side panels.
Altarpiece and other paintings
Rubens’s Assumption of the Virgin, an oil painting on canvas dated 1626, stands on the Baroque high altar. It measures approximately 4.90 by 3.25 metres. Behind the altar, at the end of the choir, hangs Abraham Matthyssens’s Death of the Virgin from 1633. In the crossing lantern, Cornelis Schut’s Assumption of the Virgin from 1647 occupies an area about 5.8 metres in diameter, approximately 43 metres above the floor.
Other paintings include Jakob de Backer’s Last Judgment of 1580, Frans Francken I’s Christ among the Doctors of 1587, Otto van Veen’s Last Supper of 1592, Maarten de Vos’s Marriage at Cana of 1597, and Ambrosius Francken’s Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes of 1598. A painting from the circle of Rogier van der Weyden, The Election and Marriage of Mary, dates approximately from 1450 to 1475. The collection also includes Abraham van Diepenbeeck’s Saint Norbert.
The cathedral’s later artistic history includes Jan Fabre’s The Man Who Carries the Cross, present since 2015, and Sam Dillemans’s Homage to Rubens: The Descent from the Cross, made in 2003 and installed beside Rubens’s painting in 2018. Together with stained-glass windows, fresco fragments, sculptures, altars, tombs, and decorative woodwork, these works combine Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neogothic elements.
Pulpit and confessionals
The central nave contains a large oak pulpit in the Baroque-Rococo style, dated 1713 and made by Michel van der Voort. It originally stood in Hemiksem Abbey and was transferred to the cathedral in 1804. Its imagery includes the four continents, the four Evangelists, Christ, Mary, Saint Bernard, the Holy Spirit represented as a dove, and an announcing angel.
Groups of confessionals made in 1713 by Guillielmus Ignatius Kerricx and Michael van der Voort also came from Hemiksem Abbey. They include 24 statues of apostles and female personifications of virtues.
Organs and architectural inventory
Schyven organ
Pierre Schyven built the main organ in 1891 after the Brussels firm Schyven, Walcker and Company received the contract in 1889. Its construction was enabled by a donation of 150,000 francs from Maria Eugenia Kempener, who left the money to the cathedral after her death on 20 February 1878. The instrument has four keyboards, a 30-note pedalboard, 90 registers, and about 5,700 pipes. It occupies three levels and retains most of its original parts. Its Baroque wooden case dates from 1657 and was made by Michel Boursoy and Pieter Verbrugghen the Elder after a design by Erasmus Quellinus the Younger.
Other organs and fittings
A Metzler organ built in Switzerland in 1993 follows the Baroque style and has 44 registers on three manuals and pedal. Smaller positive organs include a four-register instrument made by Marc Leuridan in 1987 in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament and a six-register instrument made by Mårtenssons in the Chapel of Saint Joseph.
One stated inventory counts approximately 128 windows, including about 55 stained-glass windows, 57 principal altars, 125 columns and arches, and 49 bells. These elements belong to a building whose internal length is approximately 119 metres and whose central spatial arrangement remains defined by the long nave, crossing, transept, choir, ambulatory, chapels, and three towers.
