Every Ring of Chainmail...Bruges!

Two Saturdays ago now, I had the privilege of touring Bruges with my art history class.  It was absolutely frigid.  Bone-chillingly cold.  And also breathtakingly beautiful.

The canals, usually populated by boat tours, were frozen solid, except for pools ‘round the edges where white swans and black cormorants floated and bobbed, and the ice reflected back the brightness of the sun and the blueness of the sky until there was such a riot of sparkle and a glow of gold that I almost forgot how long it had been since I’d felt any sensation in my ears.

Frozen Canal

On the scale of sheer grandeur, my favorite was probably the house-palace of Louis Gruuthuse, of a merchant family turned aristocratic.  He once entertained the king of France in his personal house.  He had a sculpture of himself on horseback, a position typically reserved for royals, mounted over the lintel of his door.  And, he had a personal, enclosed catwalk made that soars from his house across a side-street and directly into his own private compartment balcony at the front of Our Lady’s Church, which still bears his decidedly humanistic motto, “plus est en vous” – more is in you.

Mr. Gruuthuse lived here (note horse, bottom right)

And got to church here (note stone catwalk, just under the buttress)

On the side of quirk, I found this fantastic horse fountain, and snapped it with the very last shot before my camera battery gave up the ghost completely.  He’s so adorable and goofy and horsey, isn’t he?  I want one in my country-house garden someday.

The Belfry, atop the edge of the Clothhall

 As much of Bruges is actually old as is nineteenth-century restoration, made to look old.  Among the actual old ones are the Clothhall and Belfry, below and left.  The bottom part, the large building, is the thirteenth-century clothhall, where medieval merchants brought imported wool from England, and workers took it away, then brought it back as finished cloth to be exported for profit.  The very bottom part of the belfry is thirteenth-century as well.  Now personally, I always thought that only a church had a belfry, but apparently I was quite wrong.  The word comes, etymologically, from the wooden frame that suspends the bells inside their stone tower, and a belfry was actually symbolic of a medieval town’s independence.  Villages that were part of a fief were not allowed to have their own non-church belfry, but all the towns which were granted independent charters were granted one, to sound alarms or celebrations or the like on their own.  This belfry was built up to the top of the square part in the fourteenth century, and the very tallest part was added in the fifteenth century, so altogether it represents three hundred odd years of prosperity and independence in Bruges.

The Clothhall, with the edge of the Belfry

 On the order of real old things, surviving Romanesque churches are rather hard to find.  Here is an excellently heavy, massive, windowless one, St. Basil.

And, on the order of not very old at all but completely fabulous, here is the nineteenth-century neo-Gothic interior of the Chapel of the Holy Blood.  Theoretically, one of the Counts of Flanders who went on Crusade in the twelfth century brought back a relic of the Holy Blood, meaning Christ’s own.  It played an enormous role for quite some time in attracting pilgrims, who were of course good for the economy and decent for settlement, to Bruges, rather aiding its prosperity and prestige.  The supposed relic itself is on display during the day, and frankly looks like not much in a very shiny case, but the chapel around it is a magnificent living fantasy of a church.  Sidenote: A sign above the entrance expressly forbids photography.  After about two dozen other tourists had blatantly violated this request, well…it was simply too good to miss, and I turned off my flash…

It's all painted, in the most vivid colors...

When it’s not on display, the relic of the Holy Blood lives in this enormous sparkly case at right, which I thought was a worthy art piece unto itself.

And there was, of course, the part of the trip that led to the title of this post:  the Jan Van Eyck paintings in the Groeninge Museum.  (Sadly, my camera was dead as a doornail by the time we saw the Hans Memling museum in medieval St. John’s hospital later in the day, but Van Eyck was more amazing, anyway, or at least, the selections we saw were.)  Also sadly, I apparently didn’t think to take a close up of the exact chain mail in the post title.  Nevertheless, the Van Eycks were incredible.  Art in museums is tough to photograph well, and I usually prefer to spend my time looking at it without a view-finder, but for the sake of you, my well-loved and recently post-deprived readers, I snapped a few pictures of one of the most famous Van Eycks.  The detail that one can see in person in this painting is incredible.  It’s better than a photograph, because the colors are all luminous and intense, making it seem grander, almost hyper-real in a way that really makes you stop and pause for breath.  Then, you begin to wrack your brains wondering how on earth anyone ever had the patience and skill to paint this!  Here is first a view of the whole painting, followed by a close up of the hem of the Virgin’s robe, with its pearl and jewel trim.

In person, it looks so life-like and three dimensional that I did a double-take, at first thinking, “Is that a real beaded ribbon?”  It is so deceptively like a mixed-media work – you can see the roundness of the beads, so much so that you believe if the glass weren’t there, you could touch them and they must really be spheres.

Not pictured in like manner, malheuresement, is the knight’s chain mail skirt (for lack of a better word).  The edge of his tunic, perhaps?  Whatever you call it, it is stunning.  I took a magnifying glass and stared into it, and, do you know, you can see every single ring, in full?  They are so tiny, maybe an eighth-inch high each, and Jan Van Eyck managed to paint every edge of every one, and the minuscule shadows where they overlap one another, and the differing lights on the ones that fall outwards or recede into the folds of the metal fabric.  It is absolutely impossible, but it’s true.

Oh, and by the way, this is by Michelangelo. Yes, The Michelangelo.  It is one of his few works which now resides outside of Italy.

And this at right is early twentieth century.  I just happened to adore it.  The colors are so light and bright and morning-like, in person.  And when you stand back, the strokes that look too harsh here blend into such a pretty, atmospheric, hazy-summer-morning effect.  We were supposed to walk right by this one in the quest for things medieval and Renaissance, but I simply couldn't.  I just ran to catch up later.

 And this bottom, the one with the dancing shoes, was just posted along an alleyway that we walked through, charmingly.

Stay tuned, dear reader!  (I've always wanted to say that - "dear reader.")  Plus est pour vous...