CHAPTER 5 The Blessed Sacrament and the Marriage Chapel

5.1 Introduction

The Eucharist is the heart of Catholic worship “so far as it is the sacrifice of the .”1 In St. Jacob’s the Blessed Sacrament Chapel animated that devo- tion. The Blessed Sacrament Chapel kept St. Jacob’s alive when other parts of the church, the parish itself and its confraternities, withered and died. Ornament sprang up again most quickly in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel after the iconoclasts uprooted it in 1566 and 1580. During the Counter Reformation the Blessed Sacrament Chapel flourished more luxuriantly than other institu- tions in St. Jacob’s. The chapel expanded twice. It grew by a third in 1664–5 and then added a smaller inner chapel to house the consecrated host. That smaller space also served as an exclusive marriage chapel, the only one of its kind to survive, decorated in a unified program of illusionistic wall paintings and sculpture. Members of Antwerp’s artistic professions served as wardens of the Blessed Sacrament Chapel with an intensity of commitment unequalled in the other and brotherhoods of the church. Two chapel wardens in par- ticular, one an art dealer and the other a silversmith, transformed the chapel at critical junctures. They commissioned innovative masterpieces of Flemish sculpture and the silversmith fashioned with his own hands sacred vessels that glorified worship of the Eucharist. Finally, three Spanish merchants provided the impetus to build the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in the mid-16th century. Later a monumental stained glass window donated by a Spanish merchant intertwined the ascent of the ruling Hapsburg dynasty with veneration of the Eucharist and by extension with the new triumph of Catholicism. The cha- pel inspired a tenacious group loyalty that was renewed continuously by its decoration. St. Jacob’s Sacrament Chapel became a vital center of Counter Reformation fervor in Antwerp.

1 Aquinas 1981, IV, 2359, Summa Theologica Pt.III, Question 63, Article 6.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004311886_007 186 CHAPTER 5

5.2 The Eucharist Chapel at St. Jacob’s

The Eucharist is the greatest sacrament of the Church because in it “there is the Author Himself of sanctity before it is used.”2 Through transubstantiation the bread and wine become the real body and blood of Christ in a doctrine that the held since 1215. Sacrificed at every mass, venerated as an object of worship, and eaten at communion, the consecrated host was dis- played as the most visible of sacraments, because the Catholic Church needed to convince the faithful that they saw what only faith could credit.3 At the cen- ter, the host itself (hostia in Latin means sacrificial victim), circular image of God’s perfection, often was imprinted with signs of Christ’s sacrifice. The per- sonification of Faith standing at the front of St. Jacob’s pulpit displays a cross to which the sculptor Ludovicus Willemssens affixed in 1690 a consecrated host. Gilded rays of divine light radiate outwards, and a Crucifixion imprinted at the center makes explicit the real presence of Christ’s body in the holy bread.4 (see above, fig. 3.15). At St. Jacob’s that incarnation of divinity was glorified in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, a latecomer that conformed to the pattern already set by chapels and altars built throughout the Netherlands to venerate the Eucharist. Usually, as at St. Jacob’s, these chapels stood in close proximity to the high of a church where the consecrated host always was present.5 All the sacrament chapels or altars built in Antwerp churches occupied the same position—on the south, Epistle Side of the high altar.6 They never came alone, but always joined in a symmetrical pair, coupled with an Our Lady Chapel located in the equivalent place on the north side (see the next chapter for St. Jacob’s Our Lady Chapel). These chapels, dedicated to the Virgin Mary and to the Eucharist, attained a separate institutional status as “great chapels” that

2 Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent 1950, 74, Thirteenth Session, Chapt. III. 3 Rubin 1991, 288–294. 4 Molanus 1771, 492, also mentioning hosts imprinted with Mary and the child, or the . 18th-century editor Paquot thought these Marian images inapt, a sign of more rigorous demand for Christological iconography. 5 In two prominent Brabant churches. St. Gummarus in Lier and St. Pieter’s in Leuven, Sacrament Chapels were located in the radial ambulatories: see Leemans 1972, 141. 6 See plans of the , St. Jacob’s, St. Andries, St. Paulus (formerly Dominican Church), St. Walburgis, and St. Joris Churches, respectively nos. I, II, III, IV, XV, and XVI, in De Wit 1910. Also see Prims 1923, 65, on the Sacrament Chapel founded early in the 16th century in the St. Joris Church. See Visschers 1853, I, 17, 240, who records that a Sacrament Chapel was dedicated 1530 in the St. Andries Church, but that the Sacrament Chapel as built adjacent to the choir was begun only in 1660.