Nassau Chapel

En un regard

Le château en bref

A relic of the former Nassau Palace, the chapel is now enclosed within the building of the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), on the Boulevard de l'Empereur, on the slope of the Mont des Arts. A first chapel dedicated to Saint George and Saint Catherine was authorised as early as 1344 for the town house of Guillaume de Duvenvoorde, but the present building was erected at the end of the 15th century for Engelbert II of Nassau and was completed around 1520, in the late Brabantine Gothic style with flamboyant decoration. Its history is unusual: a residence of the Orange-Nassau family, confiscated and then returned, it served as the seat of the court after the fire at the Coudenberg in 1731. When Charles of Lorraine had the palace rebuilt in the Neoclassical style from 1756, the chapel was spared. In the 19th century it housed, in turn, a brewer, a depot and then a laboratory of the Museum of Natural History, where the Bernissart iguanodons were assembled in 1877. It later housed the repository of the International Institute of Bibliography, then the reading room of the State Archives, before being incorporated into the Royal Library of Belgium in 1958. Listed as a monument by the Brussels-Capital Region in 2001, it has been part of the KBR's museum circuit since September 2020.