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Daily 8am-6pm; free. Treasury Mon-Fri 10am-12.30pm & 2-5pm, Sat 10.30am-12.30pm & 2-3.30pm, Sun 2-5pm; ?1.25. Crypt Tues-Thurs 10am-noon & 2-5pm; ?2.50. Metro: Gare Centrale . It takes only a couple of minutes to walk from the Grand-Place to the east end of rue de la Montagne, where a short slope climbs up to the Cathedral , a fine Gothic building whose commanding position has been sorely compromised by a rash of modern office blocks. Begun in 1215, and three hundred years in the making, the cathedral is dedicated jointly to the patron and patroness of Brussels - St Michael the Archangel, and St Gudule, a vague, seventh-century figure whose reputation was based on her gentle determination: despite all sorts of shenanigans, the devil could never put her off her prayers. The cathedral sports a striking twin-towered, whitestone facade , with the central double doorway trimmed by fanciful tracery as well as statues of the Apostles and - on the central column - the Three Wise Men. The facade was erected in the fifteenth century in High Gothic style, but the intensity of the decoration fades away inside with the airy triple-aisled nave , completed a century before. Other parts of the interior illustrate several phases of Gothic design, with the chancel being the oldest part of the church, built in stages between 1215 and 1280 in the Early Gothic style. A stairway in the north side-aisle leads down to the Romanesque crypt , which gives an inkling as to the layout of the first church built on this site in the eleventh century. The interior is short on furnishings and fittings, reflecting the combined efforts of the Protestants, who ransacked the church (and stole the shrine of St Gudule) in the middle of the seventeenth century, and the French Republican army, who wrecked the place a century later. Unfortunately, neither of them dismantled the ponderous sculptures that are attached to the columns of the nave - clumsy seventeenth-century representations of the Apostles, which only serve to dent the nave's soaring lines. Another, much more appealing survivor is the massive oak pulpit , an extravagant chunk of frippery by the Antwerp sculptor Hendrik Verbruggen. Among several vignettes, the pulpit features Adam and Eve, dressed in rustic gear, being chased from the Garden of Eden, while up above the Virgin Mary stamps on the head of the serpent. The cathedral also boasts some superb sixteenth-century stained-glass windows, beginning above the main doors with the hurly-burly of the Last Judgement . Look closely and you'll spy the donor in the lower foreground with an angel on one side and a woman with long blonde hair (symbolising Faith) on the other. Each of the main colours has a symbolic meaning with green representing hope, yellow eternal glory and light blue heaven. There's more remarkable work in the transepts , where the stained glass is distinguished by the extraordinary clarity of the blue backgrounds. These windows are eulogies to the Habsburgs - in the north transept, Charles V kneels alongside his wife beneath a vast triumphal arch as their patron saints present them to God the Father, and in the south transept Charles V's sister, Marie, and her husband, King Louis of Hungary, play out a similar scenario. Both windows were designed by Bernard van Orley (1490-1541), long-time favourite of the royal family and the leading Brussels artist of his day.
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