Back to the beginning of M
One hundred years ago, Victor Vanderkelen, the son of the former mayor Leopold Vanderkelen and his wife Maria Mertens, bequeathed the original home on the museum site to the City of Leuven to found a museum there. But the roots of M go back even further than 1917. ‘From the late 18th century, there was a cabinet of curiosities at the town hall’, Head of Collections Marjan Debaene says. ‘We do not know what it looked like exactly, but we do still have almost all the objects that it contained. To offer our visitors a glimpse of our museum history, M is creating a new cabinet of curiosities with the oldest pieces in our collection.’
This is the very first M Collection. It contains objects like the wheelbarrow that was used during the ground-breaking of the canal, or the head of a 16th-century giantess, a relic of the city procession that took place every year during Leuven Fair. But it also contains some unique architectural heritage, such as the design for the tower of Saint Peter’s Church on parchment.