14
SAINT ANNE’S CHURCH, NOORD In 1776, lay priest Domingo Bernardino Silvestre founded the first St Anne’s Church. It was located more or less on the same spot as the present one, but was little more than a mud building with a thatched roof. In 1831 the simple place of worship was replaced by a brick church, which in its turn was replaced by a new building constructed in 1885 and 1886. The present church was built between 1914 and 1916. Father Stephanus van de Pavert designed it, but he let his brother, architect R.A. van de Pavert, develop the plans. There are many similarities with the design Van de Pavert made for the Santa Rosa Church on Curacao. This is an aisle-less church (with no separation between the nave and aisles) with Neoclassical and Neo-Roman characteristics. The church is mostly built of rubble that parishioners literally contributed for the construction. The facade has a projecting mid-section, with a church door ending in a semicircle. There is rose window with a picture of the church’s patron saint, Saint Anne, with the Virgin Mary in the blind arch (a recessed section of the facade). Above it is a light with a picture of Jesus on the Throne. The church’s sidewalls have four crow-stepped buttresses. Past the main entrance, the visitor enters the heavy stone base of the tower, with very high underpasses on three sides. The dome of the aisle-less church has an open roof truss with sixteen visible wooden rafters. A high traverse rib (perpendicular to the room’s longitudinal axis) separates the nave from the chancel. The side altars are dedicated to Mary (left) and Anne (right). The NeoGothic oak retable on the elevated chancel was placed there in 1928. It was a gift from Saint Anthony’s Church in Scheveningen in the Netherlands. The present side altars used to be the wings of this retable. The front of the altar (predella) has a representation of the Tree of Jesse. The figurative panels of the communion rails have been preserved; the central representation of the Last Supper now forms the front of the altar. The stained glass windows, made by the art studio of W. Derix, stained glass artist and purveyor to ‘His Holiness the Pope’, were placed in 1932. In 1965 or thereabouts, Hein Derix made another four stained glass windows for the windows in the western section of the nave. There are several scenes in the round windows on the left of the chancel: Jesus on the Lake of Gennesaret, and portrayals of Saint Hilarius, Saint Innocent III, Saint Peter and a Dominican monk. Three high windows on the left side of the nave, against the chancel side, feature representations of Saint Agnes of Montepulciano,
26
monuments guide aruba