Didactic Facade Literature

Toutes ces façades (...) intelligemment restaurées donneraient à notre cité un aspect d'originalité que bien des villes seraient heureuses de posséder. (Prosper Claeys, 1907)
A walk along this "small monumental art" (Lode Hoste) takes us from the town hall to the Vrijdagmarkt, the Wolfstraat, the Penitentenstraat, the Baudelostraat and the Ottogracht. The newest façade text was only installed in 2000, the oldest dates from the fifteenth century and stood on the façade of the town hall as an example of good governance and justice. In addition to symbolic sculptures and paintings, specific city privileges could be expressed for a wide audience in a pithy message, such as the widely distributed council poem, "Hoemen ene stat regeren sal" (14th century), attributed to Jan van Boendale. In Ghent, this text on the façade of the town hall also explicitly emphasized the power of the aldermen. The relationship between the Ghent city council and the French monarch had been clouded many times since the rise of the Flemish cities in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. For example, the French king tried to control (and eventually even depose) the so-called XXXIX (= the ship's bank) with a flood of regulations. On the Ghent side, there were numerous complaints from citizens to the Parliament of Paris and there was the publication of Ghent law in 1297. This tense relationship continued into the 15th century.