Page of Pulpit by VERBRUGGEN, Hendrick Frans in the Web Gallery of Art, a searchable image collection and database of European paintings and sculptures (1100-1850)

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Pulpit

1695-99
Gilded oak, height: 700 cm, width:350 cm
Cathedral of Ste Gudule, Brussels

The Verbruggen sculptor family came from Antwerp. The great man of the family was Hendrik Frans, who created the Ste Gudule pulpit in Brussels and the confessionals of Grimberghen abbey. These preaching pulpits, which were sermons in themselves and these confessionals covered with statues, which have lost all resemblance to furniture, may scandalise purists. However, they represent the most characteristic and the most convincing product of the inventive imagination of northern Baroque: there is nothing else like it outside Belgium.