The house of Van’t Sestich is named after the Louvain patrician family of that name. High up in the wall the Roman numeral LX can be seen; a play on the surname.
The facade of Van ‘t Sestichhuis is quite striking and intriguing. The architectural style of the brick patterns show kinship with with the architecture in Bijloke, Ghent and numerous town houses in Bruges. The gable is adorned with hakstenen motives which we can recognize as the Star of David.
The architect wanted to keep all doors open Cherie… he not only has the Star of David but he also included the Christian cross in the façade… he was hedging his bets… two nicely framed shots of the house….peter:)
It is a fascinating frontage, I would love to know a bit more about it.
Beautiful brickwork, but here’s a puzzle. Since the Star of David wasn’t associated formally with the Jewish faith until the 17th century, but the family settled there in the 15th century, do you suppose the Magen Stars are a later additive for Jewish heritage, or is it possible the hexagrams and crosses instead might be some configuration of “hex” and “theta” in Greek to compliment the Roman LX?
Whups, make that “Xi” rather than Theta. Although the earliest symbols for both resemble crosses rather than straight lines used today, note in the links below that “Xi” has a numeric value of 60 – just like LX means 60 in Roman numerals on the building (and the sign tells us it’s a play on “Sestich.”)
Also note that the lower case Greek symbol for “Xi” looks very similar to the Greek symbol for a hexagon.
Xi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_%28letter%29
Hex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagon
Not sure how a hexagon plays into 60 other than some Ptolemian thing (I’m not a mathlete), but Xi’s lower case greek symbol and a hexagon ARE nearly identical nonetheless
Very interesting, thank you
That small bit of information in the post is all I could find out about it.
i like the brick work, CP
I agree, it is nice
The facade looks to me what I would consider to be typical dutch with their stupid gables.
HaHaHa. I do confess to rather liking the gables
Could we not take the window frames as the Christian cross?
They do have that look about them