St Bavo's Cathedral

Saint Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent keeps one of the founding works of European painting: the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, the Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, completed in 1432. Opened, its twelve panels span more than five metres, a single vision of a meadow of saints and pilgrims gathering around the Lamb on an altar, painted with a precision of light and texture no one had achieved before. One panel, The Just Judges, was stolen in 1934 and has never been found, and the panel seen today is a copy painted by Jef Van der Veken.

The church grew on the site of a wooden chapel of Saint John the Baptist consecrated in 942; a Romanesque crypt with painted vaults survives from the next building. The Gothic church was begun around 1274 and enlarged almost without pause for the next three centuries, gaining a new choir, radiating chapels, transepts and finally a single western tower about 89 metres high. Emperor Charles V was baptised here in 1500. After Ghent's revolt against him the old Abbey of Saint Bavo was dissolved, its monks became canons of this church, and when the Diocese of Ghent was created in 1559 it became the cathedral. During the iconoclastic riots of 1566 statues, glass and paintings were smashed, but the altarpiece was saved.

The interior is a museum of Flemish art in its own right. Rubens painted Saint Bavo Entering the Convent at Ghent for the cathedral; Justus van Gent is credited with a fifteenth-century Calvary triptych; Laurent Delvaux carved the exuberant Rococo pulpit of oak and black and white marble in the 1740s. The choir holds a Baroque high altar of coloured marble and the marble tomb of Bishop Antonius Triest by Jérôme Duquesnoy the Younger. The main organ, with more than 6,000 pipes, is the largest in the Low Countries.

Ghent was one of the richest cities of medieval Europe, grown on the cloth trade at the meeting of the Scheldt and the Lys, and its centre still lines up a sequence of towers: Saint Nicholas' Church, the Belfry and Saint Bavo's.

Getting there

The cathedral is in the historic centre of Ghent, Belgium, about 1 km from the city's geographic centre. The nearest airport is Antwerp (ANR), about 54 km away; Brussels Airport (BRU) is the main international gateway for the region. Ghent's principal railway station is Gent-Sint-Pieters, south of the old town.