St. Peter’s church in Leiden, the Netherlands

This is a video about restoration of St. Peter’s church in Leiden.

11 September 2010.

St. Peter’s church in Leiden, the Netherlands, is a gothic medieval church, built on an earlier medieval graveyard.

In 1566, during a wave of iconoclasm in the whole of the Low Countries, the paintings in the church were destroyed, except for Lucas van Leyden‘s Last Judgment.

A few years later, it became a Protestant church. In 1648, adjacent to the main church building, a new meeting hall for the churchwardens was added. It is still there, and open to the public just twice a year; including today.

The hall has the only surviving painting by Dutch landscape artist Dirk Verhart. In the seventeenth century, in at least twenty houses along the Rapenburg canal, where the rich people lived then, there was work by Verhart; however it all became lost later. The church painting by Verhart shows an Italian landscape with a ruin.

There are still eighteenth century chairs in the hall. The present table is from the nineteenth century. Originally, it was in the history room of the old university library.