BOEKFICHE The Bold and the Beautiful - In Flemish Portraits

Men in stately black, women with huge ruffs, children with golden rattles, old women with wizened faces, and self-satisfied artists… These are the main players in just about every portrait ever painted in the Southern Netherlands. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the tract of land that we today call Flanders was the economic, cultural, intellectual and financial heart of Europe. And money flows – with everyone who ...

From Memling to Rubens

The Golden Age of Flanders

Why did Hans Memling paint everything in such minute detail? How did Rubens, in just a few brushstrokes, create special effects that Steven Spielberg would envy? And why was the Southern Netherlands the artistic centre of the world for three centuries?

From Memling to Rubens: The Golden Age of Flanders tells the story of Flemish art from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as you’ve never read it before. It’s a rollercoaste...

Crazy about Dymphna

The Story of a Girl who Drove a Medieval City Mad


Sven Van Dorst, Stephan Kemperdick, Till-Holger Borchert a.o.

Around 1505 Goossen Van der Weyden, Rogier’s grandson, painted a monumental altarpiece depicting the various phases of Saint Dymphna’s insane life.

This Irish princess, who fled her incestuous father in the sixth century, was beheaded in the Kempen village of Geel. On account of her tragic end and uncompromising chastity, the princess was venerated from t...