From, Beautiful Buildings in France & Belgium, Including many which have been destroyed during the war. Reproductions in Colour and Monochrome from rare old Prints and Drawings, by and after Prout, Boys, Coney, W. Callow, David Roberts, C. Wild and others, with descriptive notes by C. Harrison Townsend, F.R.I.B.A.; New York: The Hubbell Publishing Co., 1916; pp. 122-127.
LIÉGE : PALAIS DE JUSTICE
(S. Prout)
LIÉGE : PALAIS DE JUSTICE
(W. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.)
HE Palace of the Prince-Bishops of Liége — used in modern times as the Courts of Justice — was the largest and most beautiful ever built for any Belgian Prince and one of the finest of mediæval Europe. Its details, elaborate and full of invention, are full of interest to the architect, though, if a purist in style, he will probably take exception to its manifestation of that Renaissance tendency that at the time of its erection — 1508 — was beginning to assert itself, more or less incongruously, side by side with the late Gothic.
The building consists of two large inner courts or cloisters, each surrounded by 126 arcades with depressed arches. The shafts, bases, and capitals of the latter indicate a wonderful variety of sculptured ornamentation by the celebrated Borset, of Liége.
Two interesting views of the quadrangle of the Palace are given in the Plates, if only as fuller record of a beautiful civic monument in an unhappy town that has suffered grievously at the hands of the Germans.
The principal bridge — the Pont des Arches — which spanned the Meuse, was blown up, as a defensive measure, by the Belgians themselves, but bombardment and fire, on the part of the invaders, have destroyed the Cathedral and the University — the latter under the impression, on their part, that it was the Parliament House. Elsewhere the town lies shattered and ruined. “Of the tale of houses destroyed by incendiarism or by shell-fire there is no end.”
Copyright © 2007 by Elfinspell
