Morale Boosters

The ancient Belgian city of Tournai (pop. 32,000) got a double blow in World War II. First German, then Allied bombs wrecked half its homes, wiped out many of its historic monuments and art treasures; by last year Tournai had rebuilt only 100 or so of its thousands of damaged dwellings. A group of citizens decided that sagging morale needed a boost, began to collect some reminders of the days when Tournai was one of the art centers of the western world. They visited neighboring chateaux, searched dusty parish churches and libraries, sent off letters to distant museums, burrowed in the debris around them.

After 15 months, what started as a community project had grown into one of the most comprehensive exhibits of religious art ever gathered together in northern Europe. By last week, 300 art historians and archeologists had swarmed into town to buzz among the assembled treasures, argue learnedly over dates and artists. The Vatican sent photographers to take pictures. The Belgian periodical Sa--uoir et Beaute brought out a special number singing the glories of ancient Tournai.

What visitors to the 17th Century cloth workers' guild hall saw was dazzling indeed: jewel-encrusted reliquaries and crucifixes and polychrome statues; richly colored, illustrated manuscripts so valuable that visitors were commanded not to cough or sneeze while examining them; tapestries whose strawberry pinks, forest greens, incarnadine reds were still unfaded.

Most of the work of Tournai's great years was unsigned, the loving labor of anonymous monks and artisans identity had been lost through the centuries. But a few big names survived for the town to boast about: Master Illuminator Jean de Tavernier and Tapestry-maker Pasquier Grenier, whose works, commissioned by the great lords of the 15th Century, are now treasured by the museums and libraries of Europe; Painters Roger van der Weyden, Robert Campin and Jacques Daret, whose realistic detail and rich color placed them in the vanguard of the great Flemish artists of the Renaissance.

Last week, with its big show drawing to a close, things were looking up for Tournai's present-day artists and craftsmen. The Belgian government had given Tournai tapestrymakers a 3,500,000-franc order, a new ceramics industry was being planned, the bell foundry was negotiating for a couple of big U.S. orders.

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