A special exhibition at three historic locations forms the heart of the festival. It will allow you to experience the baroque in a surprising way.
To win over their audience, the Jesuits developed a unique visual culture that was influential as far away as China. The central exhibition shows how the leading figures of Antwerp in the long seventeenth century thought, dreamed, worked and prayed.
One such protagonist was Peter Paul Rubens. At the request of the Jesuits, he created thirty-nine ceiling paintings in St Charles Borromeo Church. These were lost in the fire of 1718. During Baroque Influencers, we will bring that lost art treasure back to life at The Snijders&Rockox House. We will do so by using more than forty domestic and foreign masterpieces by Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob de Wit and Daniel Seghers.
Furthermore, the exhibition in St Charles Borromeo Church gathers devotional prints, etchings and books from the collections of various heritage institutions, including the Ruusbroec Society. In the Nottebohm Hall of the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, you can admire a reconstruction of the rich interior of the Sodality and the baroque chapel it once was.
The exhibition will be held in three locations: Museum Snijders&Rockoxhuis, the galleries of St Charles Borromeo Church, and the Nottebohm Hall of the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library*.
*The exhibition in the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library will continue until the end of August . The other two locations will close on July 16th 2023.