The marble façade
Among Antwerp's finest — Rubens helped design it.
Rolf Kranz — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Gargarapalvin — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Gargarapalvin — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Gargarapalvin — CC BY-SA 4.0
39 ceiling paintings by Rubens and his assistant Van Dyck — the largest ceiling cycle Rubens ever painted, lost when lightning set the church ablaze. His small oil sketches survive in museums worldwide as witness to what was. The ceiling was replaced in plainer stucco — what you see today is baroque without its painted ceiling, and still dazzling.
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St Charles Borromeo is the baroque Jesuit church (1615–1621) and the first great baroque church in the Low Countries — and the "Rubens church" par excellence: he helped design its façade, tower and decoration, and painted 39 ceiling paintings for it that all burned in a 1718 fire (his preparatory sketches survive) — but the Lady Chapel survived with all its marble and baroque carving. Its ornate marble façade on the quiet Conscienceplein (with the old city library) is among Antwerp's finest, and the interior is bright with marble columns and upper galleries, a high altar with a painting-changing mechanism (four huge canvases rotated by liturgical season — a theatrical Jesuit invention), and a historic lace collection in the crypt. Three minutes from the Grote Markt — free entry with limited hours, and a short stop worth making for the baroque lover after the cathedral.
Among Antwerp's finest — Rubens helped design it.
Four huge canvases rotated by season.
Survived the 1718 fire with all its marble.
Hendrik Conscienceplein 12, 2000 Antwerp