High art in the Low Countries

Bruce Anderson on the sensual wonders of Bruges

In Bruges, five minutes from the Centro Storico, you will find the Smedenstraat. Largely unknown to tourists, it contains four outstanding food shops: a butcher, a fishmonger, a cheesemonger and a greengrocer. Although the ingredients could stand comparison with any food store anywhere, we are not talking about Fauchon or Fortnum and Mason. Proprietors and customers alike would find the comparison bewildering; these are everyday shops for everyday people’s shopping.

Tourists who seek out the best that a foreign country can offer are often too ready to believe that it has a superior quality of life. But Smedenstraat proves that there are two respects in which Bruges does beat Britain. First, there is nothing like the same gulf between high food and mass food. A culture of good raw materials and sound culinary techniques unites most of the denizens of Bruges, whatever their income level. The second is the persistence of traditional, painstaking crafts and techniques. Especially in food production, affluence has not destroyed artisanship. Its fruits are on display in the Smedenstraat. The shops are usually crowded, mainly with housewives, and the atmosphere is best described as one of joyful seriousness. While gossiping and exchanging news, the mevrouwen are also poking, prodding, sniffing, scrutinising; weighing up options and recipes.

The arrival of a male foreigner immediately arouses the ladies’ curiosity. Two assumptions are automatic: that he knows nothing about food and that — whatever the evidence to the contrary — he must be in need of a square meal. So in as much as language allows, one’s shopping can turn into a seminar. I once went to collect a goose and was asked how we were proposing to stuff it. Everyone in the shop contributed to the discussion. Finally the butcher said that he would make some sausages that would work well. I could not quite understand what would be in them but, judging by the nods all round, the idea found favour. They were delicious.

The Smedenstraat helps to explain why Bruges is different from Venice. In Venice it is impossible to escape the demoralising contrast between the glorious past and the shrunken present. One is always aware of the skull behind the carnival mask. In Bruges, however magnificent the heritage and however much the city depends on tourism, there is a sense of solid undemonstrative Flemish persistence, grounded in reality. And in continuity; over the centuries, the countenances have not changed that much. To judge by their painters, the Flemings were never a beautiful race. The girls’ faces have more character than grace, while the men are stocky, thickset, with gruff, knobbly faces and jutting jaws. Flemings often sport beards, but not to conceal weak chins. Since the Renaissance, little has altered except apparel.

The language is equally jutting and knobbly. You do not know the meaning of the word guttural until you have heard a Fleming pronounce Rogier van der Weyden or Hugo van der Goes. The late Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador who made the mistake of confiding his views on Israel to Barbara Amiel, used to say that Flemish was the nearest human sound to ‘le cri de bête’. One can see his point. Given the suave and mellifluous competition from French, it seems curious that Flemish survived. Who would not prefer Saint Jean-Baptiste to Sint Jan de Doper, Charles le Téméraire to Karel de Stout?

But the Flemings are not a suave or mellifluous race. Their language suits their char acter, and helps to explain their centurieslong and truculent refusal to subside into France or Germany. Yet this least ethereal of peoples produced sublime paintings and architecture. In old Bruges, alongside the canals, the ancient brickwork dances. If Venice is Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Bruges is a Bach suite for harpsichord and cello.

Even the greatest painting can be enhanced by a context, as with an altar piece that is still in the church for which it was painted. In the case of Bruges, the finest paintings never left their context. The Memlings are still in St John’s Hospital, for which they were commissioned. Today the building may be a museum, not a hospital, but it is rooted in its origins, just as the Bruges masters were rooted in civic pride and civic piety.

Amid such treasures, it seems absurd to talk about a favourite Bruges painting, but mine is in the Groningen Gallery. It is van Eyck’s ‘Madonna with Canon van der Paele’. The Canon, who paid for the painting, was a distinguished Bruges churchman of the mid-15th century, and the painting of him is one of the first great bourgeois portraits. The Canon looks overawed, as well he might in the presence of such exalted personages. He is also plump — his housekeeper would have been well known in the 15th century equivalent of Smedenstraat — and he is holding a pair of spectacles; his face has a hint of fussiness. Is it fanciful to suppose that the Canon was well known for playing with his glasses and that his contemporaries would have chuckled when they saw them? In Renaissance Bruges, great art was not confined to an aesthetic holy of holies. It was part of the continuum of daily life. To a greater extent than in most cities, it still is.

Apropos of the ethereal, the city does contain one girl whose features could never be accused of lacking grace. Charles le Téméraire had a daughter, Mary, whom I have written about in these pages before. When he was killed at the siege of Nancy, in 1477, she became Duchess of Burgundy and Countess of Flanders at the age of 18. With characteristic French magnanimity, Louis XI promptly invaded, intending to marry her to his eldest son and thus gobble up her domains. But she found an ally, Maximilian of Austria, whom she did marry. Though it appears to have been inspired by love, it was also the most important of all dynastic unions. From Mary’s womb sprang centuries of history and conflict; her grandson was Charles V.

But her reign and her happiness were brief. In 1482, while hunting near Louvain, she was thrown from her horse. Three days later she expired. Queens have died young and fair. Her tomb is in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges (the Flemish is Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk) and the effigy is a masterpiece; idealised no doubt, but there are few finer female portraits. She is captured for immortality in a poem of girlhood: ‘Like Mary, Mother of God, your exemplar/ How beautiful, how beautiful you are’.

This 500-year-dead Princess has the strangest effect on me. It has never been suggested that she was a candidate for sanctity — that might change if she converted me — but up to now only embarrassment has prevented me from falling to my knees to pray beside her tomb. Pray to what or whom? I do not know, but I always feel an overwhelming sense of the sacred in which I do not believe.

That said, even the most ardent secularist might be tempted to pray in Bruges, to give thanks for the city’s survival. Over the centuries Flanders was one of Europe’s favourite battlefields. A few miles from Bruges, the Abbey of the Dunes used to enhance the Flemish coastline until it was utterly destroyed during the religious wars of the 16th century. Four miles north-east of the city, Damme and its church are worth a visit, even though the church was also ravaged during that time. Fortunately, this was the nearest that the iconoclasts got to Bruges.

The guide books will tell you where everything is to be found, including the restaurants. Gouden Harynck and De Karmeliet are among the best in the world, and priced accordingly. But a more modest establishment should not be missed: Breydel-de Coninck. A little over a year ago I had a meal there. It began with a mystic marriage of langoustines and garlic butter; it was hard to imagine that anything from the sea could taste better. For the main course, I found something that almost did; a couple of Schelde sole: at their best, in my view, superior to the Dover ones. These were at their best. Two of us ate the same with a couple of bottles of Sancerre and sundries (which I have forgotten) and the bill was just under £100. If there were a restaurant like that in London, it would be booked up a year in advance.

There is also De Garre, a small, very Flemish pub which is an ideal place to learn about the glories of Belgian beer. Customers are restricted to three half-litre glasses of one house beer, and when you have drunk them you will understand why. Allowing for the higher level of impurities in beer, it is as strong as some wines.

The ideal time to visit Bruges is whenever you feel like doing so, though high summer is best avoided. The canals niff, there can be mosquitoes and there are too many other people, even if nothing on the scale of the great Italian cities. Whatever your view of the cult of Duchess Mary, it is impossible not to enjoy yourself in Bruges, and if you go by car, fill it up in Smedenstraat.