15. Mt. Calvary, St. Paul's Church, Antwerp - 9 Sept 1900 | Glass Plates
Calvary, outside the walls of Jerusalem, is the site named in the Gospels as the location of Christ’s crucifixion. Yet this Mt. Calvary, pictured, is a long way from the Holy Land.
Seemingly growing barnacle-like up the side of St. Paul’s Church, Antwerp, this sculpture garden representing Christ’s crucifixion serves the city as a kind of miniature pilgrimage for Christian meditation on the sacrifice and resurrection. The central path is lined by statues of angels, on the left is the garden of the prophets, on the right the garden of evangelists, and these all lead to the Holy Sepulchre climbing up the side of the church with Christ looking down over the garden.
The Calvary in Antwerp?
The Calvary sculptures were constructed between 1697 and 1747 to meet the specific needs of the age.
Two Dominican friars, the brothers van Ketwigh, had just returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and faced the troubling reality that the advancing Ottoman troops would make similar pilgrimages difficult for other Europeans to undertake for the foreseeable future.
Wishing to ensure the message of Christ’s sacrifice at Calvary was still within reach and accessible to the people of Antwerp, one of the brothers, Dominicus van Ketwigh, conceived the construction of this sculpture garden as a place of Christian contemplation.
The Calvary is built on a former graveyard that has been transformed into this garden of stunning statuary that can be admired for the faith that brought it into being, or simply for the craftsmanship and scale of the sculptures as artworks in of themselves.
Fifteen Snapshots of Belgium in 1900
Thus, we reach the end of the first box of glass plates. This box contains fifteen photographs of Belgium, the list starting in Waterloo, travelling to Brussels, and ending in Antwerp. Of course, as we have discussed in previous posts, the list order is different from the chronological order by date; the Antwerp photos being dated the 9th of September, while the Waterloo were taken on the 11th, and the Brussels on the 10th and 12th.
Although conjecture, this slight confusion can be explained by the photographer choosing to organise his glass plates by geography. This can be evidenced by the fact that the next box of glass plates moves out of Belgium and over to Luxembourg and Northern France.
It is also clear that there are a few mistakes made, likely due to lapses in memory as the list was written once the photographer had returned to England.
Next time we shall start on the second box of glass plates, I hope you will join me.
References
‘Calvary Garden’, Sint Paulus Antwerpen <https://www.sintpaulusantwerpen.be/en/art-history/calvary-garden/calvary-garden/>
1900 Glass Plates: This project explores a series of glass plates from the year 1900 with the eventual goal of travelling the same route as the photographer. It will be a varied journey that will stretch from simple blog posts examining each photo to videos and more. This project is in collaboration with photographer Aleksandar Nenad Zecevic, who’ll be restoring the photographs to bring out details dimmed by time. More to follow.
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