Dominican convent

The Convent of Dominicans of Ghent, commonly called Pand for Pand der Dominicanen, is a former Dominican monastery, built in 1370.

The facade on the Lys, built of gray stone, is unprepossessing at first glance, one might be led to believe that this is a long monotonous Gothic building, but this is wrong: immaculately restored, it contains cloisters, interesting architectural elements, and a sumptuous old library.

History

Its story begins when the Dominicans, at the invitation of Ferrand of Portugal and Joan of Constantinople, Count and Countess of Flanders, came to Ghent in 1220 and settled at a place called Onderbergen, probably in a building located in the very place as the convent they were to let build later, near a hospice founded in 1201. The latter becoming too cramped, the patients were transferred to the hospital of the Bijloke (Bijloke, now city museum of Ghent), and the vacant building was granted to the Dominican monks. The construction of the convent then began, and was not completed until 1370. The first step was the construction of a church. In the Scheldt Gothic style, it had a remarkable structure, since, though from considerable size (52 m x 22.5 m), it was not supported by any pillar, so that one could see the pulpit from any point of the nave.

After, between the two buildings (former hospice and church), a long building, visible from the Lys, was built. In 1470, the Burgundian countess Margaret of York, third wife of Charles the Bold, had a wing added in which they installed a library. In the seventeenth century, the Dominican friar François Romain, who was to be called later by Louis XIV in Paris to complete the Pont Royal, embellished the building inside and out. The monastery and particularly its library was completely ransacked during iconoclastic troubles of 1566, and then in 1578, was undermined again when the building passed into the hands of the Calvinists, who used the church for their own offices.

Once the Catholic authority was restored, the Dominicans regained possession of the building and occupied it until 1796, when they were permanently expelled. However, the last monks, through straw men, managed to regain possession of the convent, but, out of resources, and faced with insufficient reliefs, were eventually forced in 1822, with the permission of Pope Leo XII, to give it to a family of entrepreneurs, who refurbished it into workshops, housing, warehouses and bazaars. This reallocation paradoxically allowed the preservation of the building, but could not prevent the church, used as a warehouse and in disrepair, to fall under the hammer of demolition workers around 1860.

Today

The convent was partly listed an historic monument in 1946, and application of demolition by the owner in 1956, was not only rejected, but gave rise to the listing of the entire convent. Finally in 1963, the University of Ghent made itself owner, and the Corporation (Belgian) of Buildings was responsible for the restoration. The works, begun in the early 1970s and completed in 1991, helped to bring to light, in the corridors, the sacristy and the monks' cells, original frescoes, which are of two types: the first, of polychrome of the Gothic period (on the vaults and edges on door frames, etc.), the other, of renaissance and baroque frescoes, or, in the corridors again, earlier frescoes, revived with Sienna earth. The building is now a cultural and conference centre of the University of Ghent.