Which were the glory years for Antwerp?

 

Rubens, portrait of Anna Anthonis, c1615-18. Pious, yes, but what a face Rubens has captured!

Antwerp certainly meets the criteria for a very visitable city: great restaurants, great museums, great buildings, very walkable – and one of the world’s most astonishing station designs. But when I visit any city, I like to create a kind of coherent story to the city. It is somehow satisfying to explain a city by looking at major forces affecting it, and to see the results in the built environment, and in the artistic works that were produced in it. So, for example, you can explain the sudden reversal of fortune that affected Bruges, or Rye, or equally, the proximity of strong flows of water and nearby mineral deposits that enabled regions such as Coalbrookdale to flourish in the Industrial Revolution. 

What can we say about Antwerp? Its history is tightly linked to the Scheldt. Antwerp is a great natural port, since it provides safe anchorage, being a long way inland from the sea. Although the Scheldt is still tidal at Antwerp, which means locks are required, Antwerp also has container terminals with direct access to the sea without locks (which must be similar to the situation at Felixstowe in the UK). But the Scheldt hasn’t always been accessible to ships. Is this the cause of Antwerp’s rise and fall? 

Michael Pye’s recent book, Antwerp: The Glory Years covers the 16^th century , when Antwerp flourished as never before. This weekend I am visiting Antwerp, but I don’t get the impression of a 16^th-century city. In many respects, the visible golden age appears to be the 17^th century: a hundred years later. Is this  simply my misreading? 

Let’s glance at the history books. Few cities can have had experienced such about-turns as Antwerp. It reached a peak of success during the first half of the 16^th century; it was responsible for 75% of all Low Countries trade in 1549. Yet in 1576, Spanish troops mutinied and killed some 8,000 citizens. Then in 1585 the Spanish recaptured Antwerp and incorporated it into the Spanish Netherlands. Protestants were given four years to convert or leave, and around half the population left. Hence a population decline from a peak of around 100,000 down to 49,000 at the end of the century. 

As if this wasn’t enough, in 1648, under the Treaty of Westphalia, the Scheldt, the river by which Antwerp traded with the world, was closed to all non-Dutch ships. This catastrophe ruined the port, until under Napoleon, 150 years later, the port was reopened, and by the mid-19^th century Antwerp was the world’s third largest port. Even today is it second only to Rotterdam in Europe.

 

How does this compare with artistic achievement? Antwerp is exceptionally good for museums relating the city with its inhabitants; the Rubens House is a great example. One of the best museums is the Plantin Museum. Christophe Plantin created one of the biggest printers and publishers in Europe. He founded the company in Antwerp in 1548, and within a year (if you believe Wikipedia) “he headed one of the most well-respected publishing houses in Europe” (whatever that means). His greatest achievement was a multi-volume Bible, the Biblia Sacra or Biblia Regia, published 1568-73. However, the publishing company appears to have continued to grow thrive for over a hundred years after that. 

Rubens, 1577-1640, the greatest Antwerp painter and one of the most famous painters of all time, lived in Antwerp for most of his life, and (together with his vast studio team) produced some 1,400 works, excluding copies! This sounds like success, by any measure. 

While the Rubens House was closed for this visit, we visited another stunning collection of 17^th-century work, the Snijders and Rockox House, actually two houses next to each other, celebrating an artist and a politician who both flourished in the first half of the 17^th century. Incidentally, this museum was a model of how to display a small collection effectively.

 It certainly seems, by this very simplistic assessment, that the evidence of the artefacts around the city suggest that, that despite losing half its population in the years to 1600, the remaining citizens of Antwerp created some astonishing achievements, both cultural (Rubens, van Dyck, Jordaens) and intellectual (the Plantin firm of publishers continuing and growing during the 17^th century). All this raises, of course, many questions. Can you make such sweeping judgements about a city on the evidence of one or two buildings? I haven’t even considered what effect these glory years, whether 16^th or 17^th centuries have on the present-day city – a subject for another post. Today was the Antwerp marathon, which meant that 12,500 runners passed the front door of the Rockox Museum, probably without noticing it was there. 

But the evidence above leaves me wanting to know more. For example: much of the success of the Netherlands following independence has been attributed to its religious tolerance. But is it as simple as that? Has the link between Protestantism and economic growth, as formulated by Weber a hundred or more years ago, been overstated? Was it possible for a city to be Catholic yet progressive? Antwerp has vast, bloated, Baroque churches, and Catholicism is still very noticeable in the historic centre: there is a statue of the Virgin or a saint looking down at you from most street corners. How was it possible, or was it indeed possible, for great art to flourish in a Counter-Reformation climate? 

All this requires more investigation, but, sadly, I don’t think Michael Pye’s Antwerp: The Glory Years is likely to give me the answer I am looking for. I haven’t got the patience to extricate a coherent story from Pye’s account. After 20 pages I had to look to other sources to find out what was going on. The journalistic style meant that every major event was introduced by looking at an individual, and only slowly revealing the event being described. It’s a time-honoured journalistic trick, which becomes annoying when you are trying to find out what happened. My response is to skip a paragraph or two to see if the author reveals what the subject really is, later on – a risky technique. So answers to the question of Antwerp’s rise and fall will take a few days longer.