St. John's Cathedral
— — stone that grew its own gargoyles.
Not only on a wall.
“The Brabantine Gothic cathedral that anchors Den Bosch. Begun in the late thirteenth century, finished slowly across three hundred years, then restored across another century after that. Most visitors come for the flying buttresses, which carry small carved figures crouching along the stone ribs — musicians, beasts, a man on a phone added during the last restoration. The painter Hieronymus Bosch lived two streets away and was baptised inside. The bells over the square still mark the hours, and most afternoons the nave is half-empty and cool. from the studio
St. John's Cathedral, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Sint-Janskathedraal sits at the centre of 's-Hertogenbosch, capital of the Dutch province of North Brabant, about eighty kilometres south-east of Amsterdam. The current building was begun around 1380 on the footprint of an earlier Romanesque parish church and reached roughly its present form by 1530, making it the largest Gothic church in the Netherlands. The cathedral became a basilica minor in 1929 and was raised to cathedral status when the Diocese of 's-Hertogenbosch was re-established. A long restoration ran from 1961 through 2010, working stone by stone across the exterior.
The exterior is Brabantine Gothic carried to an extreme — five aisles, a forest of flying buttresses, and roughly six hundred carved figures perched along the stone ribs that bridge the nave to the outer wall. The figures are the cathedral's signature: angels, demons, craftsmen, animals, and during the most recent restoration a small stone mechanic added with a mobile phone. The local sandstone weathers slowly and the new replacement blocks read pale against the older work. Hieronymus Bosch was baptised here in the 1450s, two streets from his family workshop.
The cathedral is open to visitors most days outside Mass, with a small donation requested at the door. The tower, the Sint-Jansmuseum, and a guided buttress walk along the upper roofline are ticketed separately and run on a seasonal schedule from spring through autumn. The interior holds a carved oak organ case from 1602, a polychrome Madonna known as the Zoete Lieve Vrouw, and the baptismal font where Hieronymus Bosch is recorded. The Markt square outside fills on Wednesday and Saturday market days; the cathedral is a short walk from 's-Hertogenbosch railway station.