Bruges City Hall

The Bruges City Hall displays a front facade carved with stone statues of biblical figures and counts of Flanders, arranged in rhythmic niches beneath its high, pointed roof. Since thirteen seventy-six, this building has served as the seat of local government. When the guildhalls and merchants gathered here to manage the city’s trade, they commissioned these stone figures to broadcast their authority. During the French Revolution, soldiers hauled the original statues down and destroyed them, leaving the niches empty for decades.