St Aubin's Cathedral
Encyclopedia
Namur (city)
Namur is a city and municipality in Wallonia, in southern Belgium. It is both the capital of the province of Namur and of Wallonia....
, Wallonia, the only cathedral in Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
in academic Late Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
style, strikes the observer as an unexpectedly Italian statement in this northern city; in fact it was built to designs of the Ticinese
Ticino
Canton Ticino or Ticino is the southernmost canton of Switzerland. Named after the Ticino river, it is the only canton in which Italian is the sole official language...
architect Gaetano Matteo Pisoni
Gaetano Matteo Pisoni
Gaetano Matteo Pisoni was a Ticinese architect born at Ascona, who worked in a somewhat chilly academic Late Baroque manner that lies on the cusp of the latest Baroque classicising manner and Neoclassical architecture...
. It was the only church built in the Low Countries
Low Countries
The Low Countries are the historical lands around the low-lying delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse rivers, including the modern countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of northern France and western Germany....
as a cathedral after 1559, when most of the dioceses of the Netherlands were reorganized.
In the interior, the richly ornamented frieze, carved with swags of fruit and flowers between the Corinthian capitals
Corinthian order
The Corinthian order is one of the three principal classical orders of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. The other two are the Doric and Ionic. When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, two more orders were added to the canon, the Tuscan order and the Composite order...
runs in an unbroken band entirely round the church. All colour is avoided, replaced by architectural enrichments and the bas-reliefs in the pendentive
Pendentive
A pendentive is a constructive device permitting the placing of a circular dome over a square room or an elliptical dome over a rectangular room. The pendentives, which are triangular segments of a sphere, taper to points at the bottom and spread at the top to establish the continuous circular or...
s of the dome. A tower of the former Romanesque church that stood on the site has survived. In the cathedral a marble plaque near the high altar conceals a casket containing the heart of Don Juan of Austria, Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, who died in 1578; his body lies in the Escorial near Madrid. This Cathedral is classified as part of Wallonia's Major Heritage by the Walloon Region.