Church of Our Lady

The tower of the Church of Our Lady reaches 115.5 metres into the Bruges skyline, making it the tallest structure in the city and one of the tallest brick towers in the world. Construction began in the 13th century and continued for over two hundred years, and the result is a building that wears its long construction history openly — Romanesque foundations, Gothic nave, and a tower that gets progressively more ambitious the higher it goes.

But the reason most people visit has nothing to do with the architecture. In the southern aisle, behind protective glass, stands Michelangelo's Madonna and Child — a 128-centimetre white Carrara marble sculpture created around 1504. It was the only Michelangelo sculpture to leave Italy during his lifetime. A wealthy Bruges cloth merchant named Jan de Mouscron acquired the statue, possibly through an intermediary, and by 1514 it had been donated to this church. The Madonna gazes downward and away from the Christ child, who appears about to step off her lap — a radically different composition from traditional depictions, and unmistakably the work of a sculptor who was simultaneously painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The sculpture has been stolen twice. French Revolutionary troops seized it around 1794 and took it to Paris, where it remained until Napoleon's defeat. Then in September 1944, retreating Nazi soldiers packed it into a mattress-lined truck and removed it to Germany. It was recovered by the Monuments Men from a salt mine in Altaussee, Austria, and returned to Bruges. The film The Monuments Men dramatised this recovery, though Hollywood took its usual liberties.

In the choir behind the high altar lie the magnificent tombs of Charles the Bold, last Valois Duke of Burgundy, and his daughter Mary of Burgundy — two of the finest examples of Late Gothic funerary art in Europe.