Saint James

Guide : Look up: more than 150 painted keystones form the 'stone lacework' above you, set between 1514 and 1538 by Arnold van Mulcken, architect to Érard de la Marck. Ahead, to the west, the 1600 Renaissance organ case rests on the 1538 Gothic rood screen — a marriage of two centuries in one façade. The instrument itself was rebuilt by Schumacher of Eupen between 1993 and 1998, on the model of Northern European Renaissance organs. Where shall we start?

Guide : You are standing on the so-called mayors' gallery, between a neo-Gothic reconstruction of 1895 and the great choir windows installed between 1525 and 1531. The name tells a false legend, but the truth is better: the double-revolution staircase survived when the old galleries vanished, and Edmond Jamar later gave this balcony back its place above the void. Ahead, the guild window shows the city itself in glass. What do you notice first: the stone, or the city?

Guide : Here the great 1885 altarpiece almost steals the scene from what it frames. The Pietà of Our Lady of Saint-Remy, brought from a vanished church and transferred to Saint-Jacques in 1803, already carried a powerful devotion long before this neo-Gothic setting. Above it, the Resurrection painted by Denis Pesser in 1598 refuses to let the chapel close in on grief alone. Do you first notice the sorrow, or what passes through it?

Guide : Here Saint-Jacques becomes a vertical liturgical theatre. The choir, older than the nave, brings together 14th-century stalls, the great windows of 1525 to 1531, and a careful neo-Gothic recomposition in the 19th century so skilful that one barely notices it. This is not an untouched medieval block; it is something better: a continuity consciously built. Does your gaze rise first to the windows, or stop at the wood of the stalls?