Een onbekend ontwerp van Pieter Aaronsz. Noorwits: De toren van de Willibrorduskerk in Hulst (1663-1667)

Abstract

In the night of 19 November 1663 the tower of the Willibrordus church in the city of Hulst burnt down because of a stroke of lightning. Immediately action was taken for restoration of the tower and other heavily damaged parts of the church. This resulted in putting up a completely new tower, because a reconstruction of the former one, where a small warning of 14 bells had hung - likewise destroyed - would not have enough room for two ringing bells and a new carillon of 28 bells, ordered from the famous Amsterdam bell founder François Hemony. During those years Hulst was part of the Generality land Dutch Flanders, a region directly governed by the States General in The Hague. That is why Pieter Noorwits, the architect of the States of Holland in The Hague, was assigned by the Generality to design the new tower. Noorwits' oeuvre has not been studied up to now. He is almost exclusively known as the architect of the spectacular New Church of The Hague (1656). His activities on behalf of Hulst have never even been mentioned, although a large amount of archival sources is available for a description of the building process of Noorwits' tower - which, by the way, burnt down in 1876 - and even for a qualitative comparison of his creation with the works of his contemporaries. It can be concluded that Noorwits' tower in Hulst bore characteristics typical of the works of the generation following Hendrick de Keyser: a classicist edifice of three stories, of which the liveliness was primarily caused by architectural and hardly by any sculptural features. This holds most of all for the second storey, which was given the unusual number of eight columns - other towers getting no more than four - crowned with Ionic capitals.