
Address: Rue des Sablons, 1000 Brussels
Co-ordinates: 50.84043, 4.35625
Distance from central Brussels: a few hundred metres
Open: 9-6.30 Mondays to Friday, 10-7 Saturdays and Sundays
Parking: on the Grand Sablon if you are lucky. Otherwise Toison d’Or or Poelaert.
How to get there by public transport: 13 mins walk from Brussels Central Station;
33 and 95 buses and 92 and 93 trams all stop just outside.
How good is it? A modest coda to Hansche’s career, and a handy place to start exploring his work if you are in Brussels.
Dates of my visits: 15 March 2022; 5 April 2022
I have been working in Brussels since 1999, and I’ve regularly passed by the church of Our Lady of the Victories, between the Grand and Petit Places du Sablon, every once or twice a month – it’s not on my usual beat, but if I’m on the 92 or 93 tram, or at a conference at the Egmont Palace, or detouring a bit from the Bozar museums, it’s one of those unavoidable buildings of the central Brussels streetscape. I confess that until 2019 I had never been inside it; one more Gothic Baroque church among so many others, I thought. My mistake.
For most art tourists, the Sablon is the easiest to find of any of Hansche’s stuccos. The church itself was built in the fifteenth century, and sacked by Calvinists in the later sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century the Thurn und Taxis family, who lived across the road, invested in the church, starting with the Chapel of St Ursula, built between 1651 and 1676 and designed by the great Baroque craftsman Lucas Fayd’herbe. It’s not recorded, but would seem consistent that the Thurn und Taxis paid for Hansche’s work too. They were also the owners (and Fayd’herbe was also the architect) of Beaulieu Castle in Machelen.
The Hansche panels in the church are not all that big – only the Franc-Waret and Schoonhoven ceilings are smaller – but it gives an idea of what he could do, and will give you a taste of his style. You can actually tour the Sablon church virtually – the Hansche stuccos are on the vault immediately above the entrance and under the organ loft.
It’s the only surviving work by Hansche in Brussels, though we are told that he was active in the city throughout the 1650s. It is also the last surviving creation that we know to be by him, clearly dated 1684 (and most of his work is datable to a specific year – he was precise about these things). If, as I speculate, he was born in the mid 1620s, he would then have been in his late fifties, which is time enough to retire from a physically demanding profession. (Marc Van Vaeck says that there was also a 1685 ceiling, now lost, in Wesel, Germany, depicting the Judgement of Solomon; if so, it would postdate the Sablon.)
The central panel tells the story of Beatrice Soetkens, a fourteenth-century Antwerp woman who was commanded by the Blessed Virgin to steal a statue and bring it to Brussels. She and her husband transported the miraculous image up the river Senne in a boat which sailed against wind and current, and it was duly installed in the crossbowmen’s chapel, later the church of the Sablon. The annual Brussels summer parade, the Ommegang, celebrates this event. (I bet that even if you live or work in Brussels, you didn’t know what the Ommegang was about.)
So we see the Madonna with her Child, standing on the boat which bears her name flying from a pennant. She and the baby are both looking at Beatrice Soetkens, on the left; Beatrice’s husband, whose name is not recorded in the legend, is on the right, with a large hat. The mast and rigging are vividly realised by Hansche, and the human figures all lean into our space, though their faces have become degraded by the centuries.


It may seem odd to have religious art with a maritime theme as far inland as Brussels. But the legend of Beatrice Soetkens concerns the River Senne rather than the sea. Also, the cult of Mary, Star of the Sea, was strong throughout the Catholic Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in Maastricht (even further inland) where there is a famous miraculous image of the Virgin and Child in the basilica, the focus of massive ritual practices over the centuries.
Hansche’s Madonna in the Sablon is not directly based on the one in Maastricht – she stands upright, looking to our left, while her Maastricht counterpart is bent slightly and looks down and to the right at her child. More notably, the Maastricht statue is free-standing, rather than in a boat. But there’s a continuity of thought here.
The Star of the Sea panel is flanked by St George and the Dragon, twice. This was a theme that Rubens famously painted early in his career, but Hansche’s St George is much more traditional – apart from the multiple drooping plumes on his helmet, which are unusual. (Dürer, at the start of the previous century, also has St George with a multiply plumed helmet, but the plumes are more upstanding.)


Dragons were old hat for Hansche at this stage of his career, and these are not his best. But you can see that the saint’s lance and limbs, and the animals’ legs, are all realised in three dimensions.
There are two smaller panels at either end of the portico. On the left is a pope, unlabelled. It looks like a sceptre in his right hand has broken off. The pope at the time was the scholarly Benedict XIV, but popes in churches are usually Gregory I from more than a thousand years earlier.

And on our right, it’s Our Lady again, this time solo and on dry land. (Actually, given that she is wearing a crown, she is probably in her celestial realm as Queen of Heaven.)

Hansche helpfully dated the work, so we know it was done in 1684.

If you’ve gone through these pages in chronological order, this is the last one, and thank you for accompanying me on this journey. If on the other hand you’re travelling from most to least accessible, you are starting here and you have some treats in store.
(All photographs copyright Nicholas Whyte)
Introduction: The amazing stucco ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche
(The one that might not be by Hansche in the Gent law library)
The ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche, from most to least amazing:
Leuven – Park Abbey | Modave Castle | Gent – Brouwershuis | Antwerp – Sacristy of the Church of St Charles Borromeo | Sint-Pieters-Rode – Horst Castle | Machelen – Beaulieu Castle | Gent – Canfyn House (in storage) | Wesel, Germany (Fischmarkt) (destroyed) | Kleve, Germany (destroyed) | Perk – Church of St Nicholas | Wesel, Germany (Zaudy) (destroyed) | Brussels – Church of the Sablon | Franc-Waret – Church of St Remigius | Aarschot – Schoonhoven Castle | Leuven – Priory of the Vale of St Martin (destroyed, little known)
The ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche, from earliest to latest date of creation:
1653: Antwerp – Sacristy of the Church of St Charles Borromeo | 1655: Sint-Pieters-Rode – Horst Castle | 1659: Machelen – Beaulieu Castle | 1666-72: Modave Castle | 1668-70: Perk – Church of St Nicholas | 1669: Franc-Waret – Church of St Remigius | 1670s: Leuven – Priory of the Vale of St Martin (destroyed) | 1671: Aarschot – Schoonhoven Castle | 1672: Wesel, Germany (Fischmarkt) (destroyed) | 1672/79: Leuven – Park Abbey | 1673: Gent – Canfyn House (in storage) | 1673: Gent – Brouwershuis | 1677: Kleve, Germany (destroyed) | 1677 Wesel, Germany (Zaudy) (destroyed) | 1684: Brussels – Church of the Sablon
The ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche, from most to least accessible to tourists:
Open to the public: Brussels – Church of the Sablon | Leuven – Park Abbey | Modave Castle | Perk – Church of St Nicholas | Franc-Waret – Church of St Remigius
Not normally open to the public: Antwerp – Sacristy of the Church of St Charles Borromeo | Sint-Pieters-Rode – Horst Castle | Machelen – Beaulieu Castle | Aarschot – Schoonhoven Castle | Gent – Brouwershuis
Not accessible: Gent – Canfyn House (in storage) | Wesel, Germany (Fischmarkt) (destroyed) | Wesel, Germany (Zaudy) (destroyed) | Kleve, Germany (destroyed) | Leuven – Priory of the Vale of St Martin (destroyed, little known)
The ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche, from west to east:
Gent – Canfyn House (in storage) | Gent – Brouwershuis | Brussels – Church of the Sablon | Machelen – Beaulieu Castle | Antwerp – Sacristy of the Church of St Charles Borromeo | Perk – Church of St Nicholas | Leuven – Priory of the Vale of St Martin (destroyed, little known) | Leuven – Park Abbey | Sint-Pieters-Rode – Horst Castle | Aarschot – Schoonhoven Castle | Franc-Waret – Church of St Remigius | Modave Castle | Kleve, Germany (destroyed) | Wesel, Germany (Fischmarkt) (destroyed) | Wesel, Germany (Zaudy) (destroyed)