During its heyday in the 16th century, Antwerp was one of the richest and largest cities in all Europe, nearly the equal of Paris or London. Its splendid fortified port assured its wealth, attracting artisans who built its magnificent Gothic cathedral and artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder who amplified its reputation.
With two other Belgian cities - Ghent, its neighbor 30 miles up the Scheldt River, and Bruges - Antwerp dominated the intellectual, commercial and artistic life of the southern Low Countries until the religious and political turbulence of the latter part of the century.Antwerp held on until the middle of the 17th century, thanks in part to the genius of such gifted and farsighted citizens as Peter Paul Rubens, who designed and built an impressive mansion in the center of the city and became court painter and diplomat extraordinaire to the Spanish Hapsburg regents who ruled it.
Most of the city's Calvinist Protestants, including Rubens' own father, were driven out between 1567 and a brutal siege in 1584 and 1585. (Rubens himself was born in Germany.) In 1648, with the end of the Thirty Years' War, Antwerp remained Roman Catholic, and the Dutch cut off its harbor from the sea. It stayed closed, or subject to Dutch tolls, for most of the next two centuries, until it was freed again in 1863. The 20th century brought two German occupations and heavy damage to the port from bombs after the Allies retook it in 1944.
Today, Antwerp claims the second busiest harbor in Europe and the sixth busiest in the world, maintaining a lively rivalry with Rotterdam, the Dutch port only 60 miles farther north.
Antwerp, which my wife and I visited this summer, is not a perfectly preserved museum, like Bruges, which owes its state to the fact that the Zwin River, its lifeline to the sea, silted up before the Industrial Age and left it high and dry.
We walked a few blocks through the old part of the city toward the Scheldt, and Antwerp's defining landmark, the soaring 404-foot-high white stone lacework tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady just off the city's main square, the Grote Markt.
Light floods into this spacious edifice, built between 1352 and 1521 in late Gothic style, through enormous stone-tracery windows created to frame stained glass destroyed by iconoclasts four centuries ago, and reflects off the cathedral's whitewashed walls. The vast expanse of the seven-aisled nave, broken only by a forest of piers and pillars, is breathtaking. And inside, in the transept and the choir, hang four Rubens masterpieces.
The painting over the main altar, an ascending swirl of red, blue and ocher, depicts the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, accompanied by an angelic host of cherubs. On either side in the transept are, to the right, the Descent from the Cross, a triptych beneath the modern choir organ case, and, in the left (north) transept, the Raising of the Cross. A fourth work by Rubens, in the second chapel behind the transept on the south side of the choir, is of the Resurrection.
We walked over to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, on the southern edge of the old city on Leopold de Waelplaats, which has the world's largest collection of his masterpieces, along with others by Jan van Eyck, the Bruegels, Roger van der Weyden and Rembrandt.
But it is also possible to develop a feel for Rubens' life and times in the villa he designed, lived and worked in, reconstructed as it used to be then, and in two other fascinating patrician homes of the period that, like Rubens', made even visitors from Italy envious.
The Rubens home is a three-story stone and brick Renaissance villa at 9 Wapper, a paved-over canal off Antwerp's main commercial shopping street, the Meir. The villa is as admirable for the fine flower garden behind it and for the collection of antique Roman art that inspired the painter as for the 10 paintings by him on display here, including a stunningly assured self-portrait in the dining room on the ground floor. There he is - city father, court painter and diplomat - in his prime, with mustache and beard, looking out from a broad-brimmed aristocratic black hat.
Rubens is buried just north of his mansion, in the apse of the Gothic Church of St. James, the St. Jacobskerk. But we continued a few blocks west to the Vrijdag-markt and the fascinating 16th-century home, offices and print shop of one of Rubens' closest associates, Balthasar Moretus, a descendant of the 16th-century humanist, printer and patron of the arts Christophe Plantin. The complex, called Plantin-Moretus House, covers most of a block, with 34 rooms displaying many treasures, including Flemish wall tapestries and portraits by Rubens and others, but also priceless examples of the printer's art of 400 years ago - not only thousands of old books but original presses and type fonts, some designed by Plantin himself, and original galleys.
The shop, in Room 4 on the ground floor, displays an index of books forbidden by church authorities, ironically enough since Plantin, who was French, had to flee to Paris in 1562 after being accused (unjustly, he claimed) of having printed some of them himself.
The wooden floors creak, and you can almost hear the clack of the presses, some of which still run off copies of Plantin's sonnet "The Joys of This World," celebrating "No debts, no love-affairs, no litigation, no relatives to share one's revenue."
I'd gladly go again just to stay at the small hotel, or to take another early evening stroll through the Vlaeykensgang, an alley near the cathedral that starts at 16 Oude Koornmarkt and emerges on Pelgrimsstraat with a view of the cathedral tower at sunset that I will long remember.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
If you go to Antwerp . . .
Getting there: Antwerp is a 40-minute train ride from Brussels; through trains to the Netherlands stop at the Central Station in Antwerp and at Berchem Station on the outskirts of town. For train information, call (32-2) 555-2525.
All prices are calculated at 35 Belgian francs to the dollar.
Sights:
Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal (Cathedral of Our Lady), Hand-schoenmarkt; (32-3) 231-3033. Open to non-worshippers from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays and 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays. Admission: $1.70. Free guided tours in English and other languages (July and August only) start at 10:45 a.m. and 2:15 p.m.
Plantin-Moretus Museum, 22 Vrijdagmarkt, (32-3) 233-0294. Open daily except Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $2.85.
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Royal Museum of Fine Arts), 1-9 Leopold de Waelplaats, (32-3) 238-7809. Open daily except Monday and holidays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $4.30, free Fridays.
Rubenshuis, 9 Wapper, (32-3) 232-4747. Open daily except Monday and holidays, 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Admission: $2.85.
Mayer van den Bergh Museum, 19 Lange Gasthuisstraat, (32-3) 232-4237. Open daily except Monday and holidays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $2.85, younger than 12 free.
Rockoxhuis, 12 Keizerstraat, (32-3) 231-4710. Open daily except Monday and holidays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free admission.
Diamondland, 33A Appelmansstraat, (32-3) 234-3612. Open Monday through Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free admission.
Where to stay:
De Witte Lelie, 16-18 Keizerstraat, (32-3) 226-1966, fax 234-0019. Ten individually decorated duplexes, suites. Doubles: $243 to $430. Closed Dec. 22 to Jan. 3. No restaurant.
Antwerp Hilton, Groenplaats, (32-3) 204-1212, fax 204-1213. Doubles: $190 to $303.
Hotel Rubens Grote Markt, 29 Oude Beurs, (32-3) 222-4848, fax 225-1940. With 36 modern rooms and parking. Doubles from $140.
Hotel Prinse, 63 Keizerstraat, (32-3) 226-4050, fax 225-1148. Quiet renovated hotel with modern furnishings. Doubles from $117, with breakfast.
Hotel Ibis, 39 Meistraat, (32-3) 231-8830, fax 234-2921. Small, modern, sparsely furnished rooms. Doubles from $86 without breakfast.
Where to eat
't Fornuis, 24 Reyndersstraat, (32-3) 233-6270, fax 233-9903. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Dinner for two with wine: $225.