Our Lady with Inkpot and Pen

Huibrecht was the son of an alderman and he had one talent nobody disputed: he could write. Not the dry prose of the city clerk or the prayers the priests mumbled, but verses — rhyming, singing, leaping verses that moved the rhetoricians’ chamber of Ghent to tears or laughter. Whenever a competition was held, the chamber sent Huibrecht, and Huibrecht won.

But on the evening before the greatest chamber play Ghent had ever seen, he sat at his writing desk and nothing came. The candle burned to a stump. The parchment stayed blank. The ink dried in the pot. Huibrecht wrote one line, crossed it out, wrote a second, tore up the sheet and stared at the wall as though the answer were hidden there. But the wall kept silent, as walls do.

His sister Elisabeth had heard him pacing until midnight and had heard enough. She knelt before the small statue of Mary in her room and prayed — not the prayer the priest prescribed but one of her own, straight from the heart, without fine words. Mother of God, help my brother, for he is losing his mind over an empty sheet of parchment.

What happened next the sources tell in different ways. Some say the light in Huibrecht’s room suddenly grew brighter, as if someone had lit ten candles at once. Others speak of a scent — incense mingled with rose oil. But on one point everyone agrees: Mary appeared. Not as a shadow, not as a dream, but as a figure of flesh and light, the Child on her arm.

The Child handed Huibrecht a goose quill. Mary placed an inkpot on the writing desk — a pot of dark earthenware filled with ink that glistened like water at night. Huibrecht took the quill, dipped the point and began to write. The words came as if someone were whispering them — verse after verse, stanza after stanza, in a hand finer than anything he had ever produced. When he looked up the vision had vanished. The parchment was full.

Huibrecht won the competition, but that is not the story that endured. What endured was the image: a Mary with an inkpot in her right hand and a Child holding a goose quill. It was placed in a Gothic niche in the northern stepped gable of the Great Butchers’ Hall on the Groentenmarkt, where the butchers inspected their meat and the city conducted its trade.

Twice the iconoclasts destroyed it during the religious wars of the sixteenth century. In 1600 it was restored. In 1797 the French removed it. On 9 April 1814 it was ceremonially reinstalled, and in 1926 sculptor Prosper Hinderyckx of Sint-Andries carved the present statue: a polychrome, crowned Mary with the Child, the inkpot and the quill — exactly as the legend describes.

Until 1975 local residents lit candles at the statue and left flowers in the niche. The poet Guido Gezelle wrote the story down in 1870 but never revealed what stood on Huibrecht’s parchment. That, he said, was between the poet and the Mother of God. Those who walk across the Groentenmarkt today and look up still see the statue in its niche — a Mary who does not pray but writes, a Child who does not bless but reaches out. It is the only statue of Mary in Flanders with an inkpot, and it reminds us that inspiration sometimes comes from above, quite literally.