Mayer van den Bergh

Mayer van den Bergh stands in Antwerp as an art museum devoted to Gothic and Renaissance works from Belgium and Northern Europe. Its neo-Gothic architecture evokes a collector’s home, with stained-glass windows, carved wood and rooms shaped around the artworks. The city’s former banking district provides a fitting setting for this intimate collection of paintings, sculptures, manuscripts and decorative arts.

Fritz Mayer van den Bergh gathered about 1,000 works before his death in 1901, focusing on art from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. His mother Henriette commissioned the building between 1901 and 1904, preserving the collection and opening it to the public. Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Dulle Griet, painted around 1562, forms one of the strongest encounters among the Flemish Primitives. Other works include Brueghel’s Proverbs, Quentin Matsys’s Crucifixion and Pieter Huys’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony from 1577.

The Mayer van den Bergh Breviary contains more than 1,400 illustrated pages, created with contributions from Gerard David, Simon Bening and Jan Provost. Travel altars from around 1400, radiant miniatures, gilded retables and seventeenth-century still lifes extend the collection beyond painting. Two panels from the Antwerp-Baltimore quadriptych and a pre-Eyckian tower retable add particular depth to Antwerp’s medieval artistic story.