Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk: Michelangelo's White Madonna

Why is it significant?

Cran your neck back to gaze up the monumental brick buttresses of the Church of Our Lady, culminating in a soaring spire that reaches one hundred and fifteen point five meters into the sky.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Cran your neck back to gaze up the monumental brick buttresses of the Church of Our Lady, culminating in a soaring spire that reaches one hundred and fifteen point five meters into the sky. It is the second-tallest brickwork church tower in the entire world, an astonishing triumph of medieval masonry that has dominated Bruges' skyline since the thirteenth century and guided navigators toward the city gates.

Step through the entrance into the south aisle to behold an artistic treasure of global significance: the Madonna and Child, sculpted in luminous white Carrara marble by Michelangelo Buonarroti around fifteen hundred and four. This delicate, introspective masterpiece is the only sculpture by Michelangelo to have left Italy during the great master's lifetime, preserved in its original Gothic chapel setting. Michelangelo carved the Madonna from a single block of flawless white stone, portraying the Virgin Mary with a melancholic, knowing gaze as the Christ Child stands lightly between her knees.

Two wealthy Bruges merchant brothers, Jan and Alexander Mouscron, purchased the statue directly from Michelangelo in Florence and arranged its clandestine transport by ship across the Mediterranean to Flanders in fifteen hundred and six. The statue has survived dramatic episodes of international plunder, including being seized by French revolutionaries in seventeen ninety-four and hidden in an Austrian salt mine by Nazi forces in nineteen forty-four before its recovery by the Monuments Men.

In the choir beyond lie the magnificent gilded bronze Renaissance tombs of Duchess Mary of Burgundy and her father, Duke Charles the Bold. Mary died tragically in fourteen eighty-two at the tender age of twenty-five following a horse-riding accident during a falcon hunt, leaving behind the vast Burgundian realm to her young son Philip the Handsome and altering the political fate of Europe.

Exit the church onto Mariastraat and look directly across the cobbled street at the ancient gables and timber roofs of Sint-Janshospitaal.