# General view [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [ARCHITECT, Flemish]() - Date: 1651-1700 - Technique: Photo ## Commentary The original town hall of Mechelen is situated on the Grote Markt of the city, it consists of two parts: the cloth hall with unfinished belfry and the Palace of the Great Council. The reason that the belfry was never finished is that the cloth trade went into decline at the moment the belfry was built, that was the fourteenth century, there was no money to complete the building. On the right of the belfry is the oldest part of the town hall, the remains of the earlier cloth hall. On the left is the Palace of the Great Council. The Great Council actually never met in the building, because it was completed in the twentieth century in accordance with the original sixteenth-century plans of the then leading architect Rombout Keldermans. The photo shows the view of the square towards the Town Hall. ## Related artworks - [Belfry]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() - [Exterior view]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()