Work on the Cathedral of Our Lady began in 1352 and finished in 1521. Jan Appelmans started the choir, Pieter Appelmans is now credited as the main architect, and Domien de Waghemakere completed the job. Antwerp has spent the five centuries since living with the result, and with the parts that were never built.

A tower and a half

The site was a chapel first, then a Romanesque church, before the Gothic rebuild swallowed both. The north tower, whose spire is credited to Domien de Waghemakere, reaches 123 metres, which still makes it the tallest church tower in the Benelux. Its stonework is cut so finely that it is often described as stone lace.

The south tower got as far as 65 metres, was given a temporary wooden roof in 1475, and stayed that way. A fire on the night of 5 October 1533 destroyed the ceiling and furnishings, and with it the plan to finish the second tower and enlarge the church. Nobody went back to it. The lopsided west front is a building site that stopped.

Cologne Cathedral stalled too, and made the opposite decision. Its builders began in 1248, downed tools in the 16th century, resumed in 1842 from the surviving medieval drawings and finished in 1880, with two towers of 157 metres. Antwerp kept its half-finished front. Its own big campaign came later and was about keeping, not adding: a complete restoration that ran from 1965 to 1993.

Four by Rubens

The cathedral holds four works by Peter Paul Rubens, whose house and studio on the Wapper is now a museum. Two of them have been to Paris and back. The Raising of the Cross, painted in 1610 and 1611, was made for the high altar of St Walburga’s church. French revolutionary troops took it to Paris in 1794; when it came home in 1815, St Walburga’s was a ruin, so it went to the cathedral instead. The Descent from the Cross, commissioned by the Confraternity of the Arquebusiers on 7 September 1611 and finished in 1614, made the same trip to the Louvre and back. The Assumption of the Virgin has stood over the high altar since 1626.

Earlier guides, the first version of this one included, credited the Assumption to Anthony van Dyck and the Raising of the Cross to Jacob de Backer. Both are by Rubens, which is rather the point of the building.

The fourth is away. Martina Plantin commissioned an epitaph triptych for her late husband, the printer Jan Moretus, whose family printing house is now the Museum Plantin-Moretus; Rubens painted it in 1611 and 1612, with the Resurrection of Christ in the centre. Its panels have cracked and the paint no longer holds, so since early 2026 it has been off display for a restoration of at least two years, with a photographic print in its place. The Flemish government pays 80 per cent and the Friends of the Cathedral fund at the King Baudouin Foundation the rest. “I am delighted that this triptych is being thoroughly restored,” said Caroline Gennez, the Flemish culture minister.

The bad years

On 20 August 1566 Protestant iconoclasts destroyed much of what was inside. Richard Clough, an English merchant who witnessed it, left an account of the wreckage that includes the phrase “organs and all destroyed”. When Antwerp came under Protestant administration in 1581, more of its art was destroyed, removed or sold; Catholic authority returned with the fall of the city in 1585.

In 1794 French revolutionaries plundered the church, and around 1798 the French administration planned to knock it down. It lost its status as a cathedral in 1801 and only regained it in 1961. The tower has been on the Unesco list since 1999, as one of the Belfries of Belgium and France.

A boy and his dog

On the Handschoenmarkt, in front of the west door, a marble boy sleeps with his dog under a blanket of cobblestones. Batist Vermeulen‘s statue of Nello and Patrasche went up in 2016. They come from A Dog of Flanders by Louise de la Ramée, in which a poor boy who cannot pay to see the Descent from the Cross sneaks in and dies of cold in front of it. The story became a popular television series in Japan, which brought its fans to Antwerp and, eventually, the statue.

Visiting

A ticket costs €12, or €10 for students, over-60s and groups of 20 or more. Under-18s and residents of the Province of Antwerp get in free, and the cathedral lists its opening hours, ticket prices and closing days on its own site, where a new price list is announced from 1 January 2027. Letting the province in for nothing is the right call: it keeps the cathedral a building its neighbours use, not one they walk past on the way to the Groenplaats. Free guided tours run during opening hours, though they do not go up the tower.

Under today’s rules, Nello would have walked in free. He was a child.