Chapter XXIX: Düsseldorf, Neuss, and München-Gladbach

_Düsseldorf_

Among æsthetic people in general, Düsseldorf is revered--or was revered, though the time has long since passed--for that style of pictorial art known to the world as the Düsseldorf School.

A remarkably good collection of pictures remains in its art gallery to remind us of the fame of Düsseldorf as an art centre, but to-day its art has become "old-fashioned," and the gay little metropolis has many, if more worldly, counter attractions.

Düsseldorf takes its name from the little river Düssel which joins the Rhine at this point.

The French guide-books call Düsseldorf the "_plus coquettes des bords du Rhin_"; and so it really is, for few tourists go there for its churches alone, though they are by no means squalid or inferior.

The city was the residence of the Counts, afterward the Dukes, of Berg--for it was made a duchy by the Emperor Wenceslaus--from the end of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth.

In 1806 Napoleon made it the capital of a new Grand Duchy of Berg in favour of Joachim Murat. By the treaty of 1815 Düsseldorf fell to Prussia, and became the chief town of the regency of Düsseldorf, and the seat of a superior court of justice.

Occupying the site that it does, on the banks of a great waterway, the city naturally became the centre of an important commerce.

Düsseldorf is the birthplace of many who have borne great names; of the philosopher Jacobi and his poet brother; the Baron de Hompesch, the last grand master of the Order of Malta; Von Ense, the eminent litterateur; the poet Heinrich Heine (who died at Paris in 1855), and the painters Cornelius, Lenzen, and Achenbach.

The principal church edifice is that dedicated to St. Lambert, the Hofkirche. It has a strong and hardy tower, very tall, and surmounted by a slate-covered spire. The ogival style predominates, and the fabric dates mostly from the fourteenth century. Its chief feature is its choir, which is far more ample and beautiful than the nave. The rest of the edifice fails to express any very high ideals of church-building.

At the foot of the apside, behind the choir, is a mausoleum erected in the seventeenth century for the elector, John Wilhelm, who died in 1690.

In the ambulatory of the choir is, on the left, a florid Gothic tabernacle, and by the second pillar of the nave is a colossal statue of St. Christopher. There are many tombs of Jacobeans, and of the Dukes of Berg.

There are also a number of paintings by Düsseldorf artists scattered about the church, but they have not the qualities exhibited by the old Flemish masters, and are hardly worthy of remark.

On the exterior of the southern wall is affixed an immense Calvary, which is theatrical in the extreme, and is not dignified nor churchly.

The Jesuit church is not remarkable architecturally, but there are a number of tombs therein of the princes of the house of Neubourg.

The ruins of the ancient château of Düsseldorf suggest but faintly its former glories before it was destroyed by the French bombardment of the city in the eighteenth century.

It has been restored, in a way, but with little regard for historical traditions, and a part of the edifice was made the home of the famous Düsseldorf academy of painting, founded in 1777 by Charles Theodore and reëstablished in 1822. It gave birth to a celebrated school of painting, now all but dead. Among the famous and well-known names connected therewith are: Cornelius, Schadow, Lessing, Schirmer, Hildebrand, and Koehler; the American, Lentzen; the Norwegians, Tiédemann and Gude; the landscape painters, Weber and Fay; and the historical painters, Knaus, Hübner, and Scheuren; and finally the celebrated engraver, Keller.

The museum and the gallery of paintings are still superb, and form a contribution to the history of the art of all ages which would be quite incomplete without it.

There are ten churches in Düsseldorf, and a synagogue, but in truth there is not much of interest in them all, and the "handsomest city of Germany" must rest its fame on something more than its appeal to the lover of churches.

_Neuss_

There is not much about the compact, though rather ungainly, little city of Neuss to interest any but the lover of churches, though its history is very ancient, and the development of its patronymic through _Novesium_, _Niusa_, and _Nova Castra_ bespeaks volumes for the part it has played in the past.

Its origin dates back to the time of Drusus, and it is mentioned by Tacitus as the winter quarters of the Roman Army. The city was ravaged by Attila in 451, and by the Normans in the ninth century. Emperor Philip of Suabia captured it in 1206, and gave it to the Archbishop of Cologne. A chapter of nobles was founded here in 825, and Count Evrard of Clèves and Bertha, his wife, erected, in the first years of the thirteenth century, its principal church dedicated to St. Quirinus.

This church stands to-day, with its great square tower looming bulkily over the house-tops, and is reckoned as the prototype of many similar structures elsewhere. It has the almost perfect disposition and development of the double apse so frequently met with in German churches.

In general, its architecture is of a heavy order, and the whole structure is grim, though by no means gaunt nor cold.

St. Quirinus is of the epoch when the Romanesque was being replaced nearly everywhere by the new-coming Gothic.

In spite of this, its style is, curiously enough, neither one nor the other, nor is it transition, though the pointed arch has crept in and often eliminated the Romanesque attributes of the round-arch style round about. It is manifestly not transition, because there was no transition here from Romanesque to Gothic. It remained palpably Romanesque in spite of Gothic interpolations.

In the windows one can but remark the indecision which prompted the builders to fashion them in such extraordinary squat shapes, and they certainly serve their purpose of lighting the interior very badly.

The nave and aisles of St. Quirinus are ample, and its spacious _männerchöre_ in the triforium is like all its fellows in the German churches, an adjunct which adds to the general effect of size.

The church dates from 1209, the period when the Gothic influence was not only making itself felt over the border, in the domain of France and Burgundy, but was already extending its influence elsewhere. But here, westward even of the borders of the Rhine, the round arch lingered on, to the exclusion of any very marked Gothic tendency.

There is an inscription in stone on the south wall of the church which places the date of its erection beyond all doubt. It reads thus:

ANNO . INCARNA.
DNI . MC.C.V.I.I.I.I.
PMO . IPERII . AN
NO . OTTONIS . A
DOLFO . COLON

EPO . SOPHIA . A
BBA . MAGISTER
WOLBERO . PO
SUIT . PMU . LAP

IDE . FUNDAME
NTI . HUI . TEM
PLI . I . DIE . SCI . DI
ONISII . MAR.

When a former Count of Clèves founded the primitive church here in the ninth century, it was a collegiate church attached to the abbey of which the mother superior was the Abbess Sophia, presumably the same referred to in the above inscription. The abbey itself was destroyed in 1199 during a civil warfare.

Though not really a massive structure, the church of St. Quirinus is, in every particular, of a strength and solidity which rank it as a masterwork of its age. There is nothing weak and attenuated about it, and its transepts and apses make up in general effect what it lacks in actual area.

The façade is imposing, though decidedly bizarre when compared with the simple flowing lines of Gothic; but, on the whole, the effect is one of a certain grandeur.

The aisles are astonishingly tall when compared with the nave.

There are various meetings of round-arched windows and arcades with those of a pointed nature, but there is not the slightest evidence of a development or transition from one to the other, hence the Gothic strain may be said not to exist.

The general effect of the exterior is polychromatic, which is not according to the best conceptions of ecclesiastical decorations in architecture. A twilight or a moonlight view, however, tones it all down in a manner that makes the fabric appear quite the most imposing church of its size that one may find in these parts.

The great central tower, reminiscent enough of the parish church in England, but not so frequent in Germany, and still less so in France, forms a great lantern which rises over the crossing in a marvellous and exceedingly practical manner, in that it affords about the only adequate means of admitting light into the interior.

The triforium of the nave is the chief interior feature to be remarked, and is most spaciously planned. It forms the _männerchöre_ before mentioned.

The clerestory windows are decidedly Rhenish in character, resembling, says one antiquary, who is a humourist if nothing else, an ace of clubs. At any rate, it is a most unusual and inefficient manner of lighting a great church. These windows are practically trefoils of most unsymmetrical proportions, and are in every way unlovely.

The choir is raised on a platform, beneath which is the crypt. Three flights of steps lead to this platform, which gives it a far more grand appearance than its actual dimensions would otherwise allow.

The choir-stalls are of the fourteenth century, and are the only mediæval furnishings to be seen in the church to-day.

The apses contain only moderately effective glass.

The frescoes in the cupola of St. Quirinus, which are the work of Cornelius of Düsseldorf (about 1811), are most interesting, and are among the most successful of the great number of modern works of their kind to be seen in Germany.

_München-Gladbach_

München-Gladbach is one of those "snug" little German towns that one comes across now and then when wandering along off the beaten track. Its streets are trim and clean, and its houses likewise, with a brilliancy of fresh paint which is consistently and proverbially Dutch. Beneath one's foot is a sea of cobblestones all worn to a smoothness which argues the tramp of countless hordes of feet over centuries of time, if paving-stones have really been invented so long. With all its air of prosperity and providence, München-Gladbach is not a highly interesting town in which to linger.

Its name is compounded of its prefix, meaning _monk's_, with its original patronymic, Gladbach. The monks of Gladbach were a part of the establishment which founded the minster church of Gladbach, an old abbey or monastic edifice which stands to-day, a great transeptless thirteenth-century structure with an elevated choir reached from the nave by two flights of ten or a dozen steps.

The crypt is entered from between these two flights of steps, and forms all that is left to mark the primitive church.

The round-arched style and Gothic, of a sort, intermingle in the nave in bewildering fashion until one wonders in what classification it really belongs. The openings from the aisles to the nave are pointed, while above is an unpierced triforium with a clerestory of round-headed arches.

In the aisles are what Jacobean architects called fanlights, a series of peculiarly shaped openings like an oddly shaped fan. They are distinctly Rhenish; indeed they are not acknowledged to be found elsewhere, and hence may be considered as one of the chief points of distinction of this otherwise not remarkably appealing church.

There are no aisles in the choir, which dates from the thirteenth century and terminates with a multi-sided apse pierced by long lancet windows.

The Stadt Kirche of Gladbach, or the parish church as it properly takes rank, is still a Catholic edifice and shows the advantage of having been kept in active use. There is nothing musty or moss-grown about it, but in every way it is as warmly appealing as the monks' church is coldly unattractive.

There is no marked choir termination, its great aisles extending completely to the rear with just a suspicion of a rudimentary pentagonal apse to suggest the easterly end. This is a common enough arrangement in German churches, which more frequently than not, in the fourteenth century, the date of this structure, possessed nothing but a squared-off east end, after the English manner of building.

At the westerly end is a well-planned tower distinctly Rhenish--if it were not it would be thought heavy--and where the choir is supposed to join the nave the roof is surmounted by a tiny spire, which, in truth, is no addition of beauty.

The interior shows great height, and, if of no great architectural splendour, has enough mural embellishment and attractive glass to stamp it as a livable and lovable edifice for religious worship, which is a good deal more than most modern church buildings ever acquire.

The six bays of the nave show pointed arches springing from rounded columns. There is an arcaded triforium, and an elaborate series of clerestory windows which show the geometrical and flamboyant Gothic in its perfection.

The apse is lighted with five windows of great height. The glass is a mixture of colour and monotone, but the effect is undeniably good.

The chancel is so shallow that the choir flows over, as it were, into one bay of the nave, while the choir-stalls themselves are placed in the aisles. Certainly a most unusual, and perhaps a unique, arrangement.

An altar fronts the west end of either range of stalls, and back, at the easterly end of the aisles, is found another altar.

The high altar has a handsome modern screen in the form of a gilt triptych, which is singularly effective and imposing.

Beneath the tower, at the westerly end, is the baptistery, entrance to which from the body of the church is gained through a low, pointed arch.