Church of Saint Martin

In 1739 men came to Zaventem to collect the altarpiece of the village church, which was to be sold. The parishioners drove them off by force while the church bells rang, and the painting stayed. It still hangs in the Church of Saint Martin, in the town now best known as the home of Brussels Airport.

The picture is Saint Martin Dividing His Cloak by Anthony van Dyck, painted around 1618, when he was still a young man working alongside Rubens in Antwerp. Martin, a Roman soldier on horseback, cuts his cloak in two to share it with a half-naked beggar. Ferdinand van Boisschot, chancellor of Brabant, had it placed in the church in 1621. A larger canvas of the same scene, with more beggars, belongs to the British Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

Zaventem tells a story that van Dyck lingered here because he had fallen for a local girl, and painted the altarpiece to win over her father. Historians have dismissed it. The painting's documented travels began with the French, who took it to Paris in 1794 and showed it at the Louvre. In 1816 it came back to the church where the villagers had once defended it.