Monday, 16 March

1. MSK: Visit to the permanent collection

with Candice Van Heghe and Inez De Prekel
Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts (MSK), founded in 1798, is the oldest museum of art in Belgium. It occupies a monumental building designed by the city architect Charles van Rysselberghe. After a collecting history of 225 years, the museum now owns almost 20,000 European artworks from the Middle Ages to 1950: paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. The core collection originated from Ghent’s churches and monasteries. It consists of an ensemble of paintings by seventeenth-century Flemish masters such as Gaspar de Crayer, Frans Francken the Elder, and Maarten De Vos. Around 1900, the collection was greatly expanded thanks to the Friends of the Museum. Their donations, bequests, and purchases enriched the Old Masters collection with masterpieces by artists including Hieronymus Bosch, Gerard Horenbout, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck.

Gaspar de Crayer, The Coronation of Saint Rosalia, 1644, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent

2. MSK: Restauration of the Ghent Altarpiece

with Hélène Dubois
The major long-term project involving the conservation and restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan and Hubert van Eyck was launched in 2012. In the first two phases, the outer panels and the lower register of the interior panel were treated; the third and final phase began in 2023. The seven upper registers of the interior, including the Deësis and Adam and Eve, are currently undergoing restoration and scientific analysis by researchers from the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA). This excursion will begin with an overview of the project’s scope, the significant discoveries made to date, and the objectives of the current phase. This will be followed by a visit to the viewing area in the museum, where the seven panels can be viewed up-close behind glass.

Restoration Hubert and Jan van Eyck, The Mystic Lamb, 1432, Courtesy of Sint-Baafskathedraal
Photo: MSK/ Martin Corlazzoli

3. Saint Bavo’s Cathedral and the Ghent Altarpiece

The Gothic St. Bavo’s Cathedral is the oldest church in Ghent, with twelfth-century architectural elements including the crypt, which has been in use for a thousand years. Originally named St. John’s Church, it has been home to the Ghent Altarpiece since Jan van Eyck completed his masterpiece in 1432. Jan’s brother, Hubert van Eyck, who started the altarpiece earlier in the fifteenth century, is buried in the cathedral. The Ghent Altarpiece is not the only famous artwork in St. Bavo’s. The interior reflects ten centuries of art history, featuring Neogothic restorations, as well as Peter Paul Rubens’s Conversion of Saint Bavo (1624) and a monumental pulpit by Laurent Delvaux.

Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, photo by Liza Knockaert via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

4. STAM – Ghent City Museum

with Wout Devuyst
Ghent City Museum (STAM) has only existed in its present form as a city museum since 2010. However, the origins of its collection go all the way back to the founding of a Musée historique belge in 1833. The museum is housed in a former Cistercian abbey that was partly destroyed during the Iconoclastic Fury and the time of the Calvinist Republic of Ghent (1577-1584). Two wings of the medieval abbey remain, with fourteenth-century pre-Eyckian murals in the refectory. The rest of the abbey was rebuilt in the seventeenth century.

During the excursion, we will explore the permanent exhibition on the city’s history, The Story of Ghent. Highlights in this chronological display include the thirteenth-century tomb of Viscount Hugo II of Ghent, monumental brasses, the fifteenth-century battle standard of the city’s militia, silver messenger badges, a series of mark plates of the Ghent goldsmiths, the oldest painted aerial view of Ghent, and processional torches of the craft guilds dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Anonymous, Panoramic View of Ghent, 1534, STAM, Ghent

5. City palaces: Hotel d’Hane Steenhuyse and Huis Arnold Vander Haeghen

The Hotel d’Hane Steenhuyse and the Arnold Vander Haeghe House are both on Veldstraat, Ghent’s main artery of historic aristocratic and commercial life. The former is an elegant eighteenth-century town house (built 1768-1773), with a façade that mixes Louis XV and Neoclassical Louis XVI styles. Its highlights are its richly-decorated salons and ballroom, reflecting the family’s wealth. It is particularly famous for having served as the residence of King Louis XVIII during his period of exile in 1815. The Arnold Vander Haeghen, across the street, is named after the amateur photographer who bequeathed to Ghent a unique photographic record of life in the city during the Belle Époque. Its most impressive room is the original eighteenth-century Chinese Salon, with silk wall hangings. These two buildings on Veldstraat offer contrasting glimpses into centuries of wealth and the cultural life of Ghent’s aristocracy.

Hotel d’Hane-Steenhuyse, Ghent. Photo: Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

6. Visit to St Nicholas’ Church and St Michael’s Church

This excursion takes place in two of Ghent’s oldest churches. St. Nicholas’ Church is at the heart of the city. Its origins are in the thirteenth century, when the building was constructed in Tournai stone in a style exemplifying Scheldt Gothic. Finally completed in the seventeenth century, thanks to the support of the traders’ guild, the church’s main altar features an altarpiece by the Ghent painter Nicolas de Liemaecker. The nave was recently restored to its original colors. St. Michael’s Church is documented as early as the eleventh century. It was never formally finished, with construction halted in 1672 after a failed effort to build a tower. The interior blends Neogothic and medieval elements. Highlights include St. Francis of Paola by Jusepe de Ribera and Anthony Van Dyck’s Golgotha, as well as a superb nineteenth-century pulpit by Jean Francois Franck and Virgin and Child by the Ghent sculptor Rombaut Pauwels, who was clearly inspired by Michelangelo’s Madonna in Bruges.

: St Nicholas’ Church, Ghent. Photo: artinflanders.be, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

: St Michael’s Church, Ghent. Photo: Johan Bakker, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

7. Small Beguinage Our Lady ter Hoyen and Church of the Presentation of Our Lady

with Sarah Moran
The “Small Beguinage” of Ghent, known as Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-Ter Hooie or Hoyen (“Our Lady of the Meadow”), was founded in 1234 by Joanna of Constantinople, Countess of Hainaut and Flanders. It was a “Court Beguinage”: a new type of semi-monastic community that offered women from a broad range of social classes a safe, respectable, and mutually supportive alternative to marriage with all its legal restrictions. These institutions became immensely popular and they remained a standard feature of cities in the Low Countries into the twentieth century.

Ter Hooie is both one of the oldest Court Beguinages and one of the best preserved. Completely rebuilt after the Dutch Revolt, the surviving architectural complex includes over 100 former Beguine houses, parts of the old infirmary, and a grand Baroque church. The tour will reveal the fascinating history of this institution, paying particular attention to issues relating to religion, community governance, and the roles of art and architecture.

Unknown artist, Small Beguinage Our Lady ter Hoyen, Ghent
Photo: Dominique Provost

CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide