Palace of Charles of Lorraine

En un regard

Le château en bref

The Palace of Charles of Lorraine, on the Place du Musée in Brussels, was built between 1757 and 1766 for Charles-Alexandre of Lorraine, Governor-General of the Austrian Netherlands from 1744 to 1780, on the site of the former Hôtel de Nassau, after the fire at the Coudenberg Palace in 1731. Its first neoclassical wing is probably the work of Jean Faulte; Laurent-Benoît Dewez completed it after Faulte's death in 1766. Passed to the City and then to the State, the palace housed the museum of the Dyle Department, the Salon de Bruxelles until 1878, the first galleries of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1881, and the Royal Library. A second wing, by Nicolas Roget (1825), housed the Palais de l'Industrie nationale. In the 1960s, the creation of the Mont des Arts led to the demolition of more than three quarters of the complex. What remains includes five salons decorated with stucco and silk hangings, a staircase housing a Hercules by Laurent Delvaux, and a rotunda whose rose window uses 28 varieties of Belgian marble. Protected since 2001, the palace is attached to the KBR: a temporary exhibition space opened there in October 2019, and it is accessible, under certain conditions, through the library entrance (Mont des Arts 28).