Belfry of Ghent

The cloth hall that was built against the Ghent Belfry starting in 1425 can rightfully be called the 'wool heaven'. Here, sheep's wool became something sublime: in the cloth hall, the famous Flemish cloth, of top-notch quality, was traded. The belfry itself was already completed by 1377 but received a wooden crown with the famous Ghent dragon as a weather vane on top. The neo-Gothic spire followed only in 1851.

The new cloth hall with eleven spans that adjoins the belfry was the replacement for the older one at Hoogpoort. Initially, the building simply had a wooden partition, later a brick wall. It wasn't until 1903 that the hall was completely finished in the Gothic style of yore.

That the people of Ghent produced cloth on a large scale and then traded it here, right across from St. John's Church (later St. Bavo's Cathedral), could not have escaped Jan Van Eyck. Of course, the Lamb of God (1432) symbolizes the suffering Christ, but by ingeniously placing the holy animal at the center, Van Eyck simultaneously served an allegory on Flanders' commercial worship of sheep's wool, a current topic because the Burgundians and the English were just then embroiled in an economic conflict concerning it.

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