Curtius Palace, Liège

The palace is a rectangular town house built of brick and limestone set on a pronounced base of large squared ashlar blocks. A high hipped slate roof (hipped roof: slopes on all sides) crowns the building. Each of the four exterior faces is arranged as four horizontal storeys of diminishing height, and the elevations are marked by stone bands that reinforce corners and edges. The overall composition follows regional Mosan traditions in layout and material, and the ensemble survives largely restored for display.

Windows are set with stone vertical and horizontal bars and are separated by decorated panels between floors. Those panels carry carved masks and small sculpted scenes placed within ornamental frames; the masks show human and animal figures, the Curtius family arms, passages drawn from religious stories, classical fables such as those of Phaedrus, and scenes from medieval comic tales. The carved elements were executed in a fine light limestone and retain phases of cleaning and repainting from modern conservation. Campaigns in the early 1980s and in 2003 cleaned these sculpted faces and reconstructed their polychrome paint where appropriate, and many of these details are today restored in situ.

The building’s entrances and courtyard reflect its function as an elite urban residence. Access is from the street through two matching gateways that lead into an interior courtyard, and a porch attached to the west façade opens onto that yard. The porch is built in the same stone and brick as the main façades and has a rounded principal doorway supported on projecting corbels and finished in dressed ashlar. Above the porch a projecting defensive-style opening, a machicolation (a projecting stone with openings, historically used to drop material on attackers), survives as part of the composition; the mount of piety once inserted an additional floor above this porch during its 17th-century occupation.

A four-storey tower rises above the central west bay and is set on the same masonry as the façades. Two sculpted volutes at its base interrupt the cornice line and the tower is topped by a broad terrace protected by a balustrade, offering historical views over the Meuse. The roofs on the south and east slopes are pierced by a series of hipped dormer windows topped with decorative finials, arranged to form a triangular grouping, and a first-floor pair of chimneys bears a dated inscription of 1604. Roof ridges, weather-vanes and finials were originally gilded; conservation work has included regilding the dormer finials and repainting the cornice green in an appearance judged very probably original.

Evidence of period construction techniques remains visible. Stone blocks show marks consistent with lifting by a hoisting device known locally as the “goat and pincer,” a type of lifting apparatus, and those traces have been interpreted as associated with the building’s original erection. The building has been repaired and adapted for museum use; restoration campaigns have returned the façades and roofs, the three entrance porches, the two chimneys dated 1604 and a ground-floor mural painting to a protected and conserved condition, and these elements are now recognised as exceptional heritage.