From, Beautiful Buildings in France & Belgium, Including many which have been destroyed during the war. Reproductions in Colour and Monochrome from rare old Prints and Drawings, by and after Prout, Boys, Coney, W. Callow, David Roberts, C. Wild and others, with descriptive notes, by C. Harrison Townsend, F.R.I.B.A.; New York: The Hubbell Publishing Co., 1916; pp. 94-97.
GHENT : STREET SCENE
(S. Prout)
hent, rich, prosperous and enterprising in its earlier days no less than now, has evidenced its later wealth by civic changes on the largest scale, which left it without many of the characteristics it possessed at the time of Prout’s sketch. Wide roads and open squares have taken the place of picturesque Flemish houses and narrow, twisting streets. In no less degree have the old buildings changed, for the hand of the restorer has been a busy one here. The following Plate gives us, in the Château des Comtes, an example of this, and we have a further one in the case of
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the Belfry or “Belfrood.” Never completed, nor carried more than two-thirds of its intended height, but harking back to the XIIIth century for its beginning, the tower has undergone many alterations and mutilations. One of the crowning wrongs wrought it was the addition — some sixty years ago — of an iron spire, painted to look like stone! The building, however, has very lately been restored to its original form, for which the original drawing is still in existence.
The Cathedral of St. Bavon — a XVIth century building — has little to offer us in its rather cumbrous exterior, but internally it is one of the most richly decorated churches in Belgium. It is, in its treatment, still entirely Gothic and free from any trace of the Renaissance, though built at a time when in France, or even in England, its design would have shown a strongly Italianized influence.
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