Long before there was a church there was a hostel. From 1431 onward the site held lodgings for pilgrims walking the route to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain, the burial place of Saint James the Great. The hostel had a chapel; in 1476 the chapel became a parish church; in 1491 construction began on the present building. It would take 165 years to finish. By the time the church was consecrated in 1656, Baroque had replaced late Gothic as the fashionable style in Antwerp, but the architects - the Waghemakere family and Rombout Keldermans, in the Brabantine Gothic tradition - had stayed disciplined to the original drawings throughout the decades. So the exterior is consistently Gothic; the interior is unapologetically Baroque. Few buildings in Europe wear two styles so cleanly.

Two waves of iconoclasm tore through Antwerp in 1566 and 1581, when Calvinist crowds smashed altar paintings, statues, and decorated screens in churches across the Low Countries. St. James' lost its original mediaeval interior. What replaced it - the carved choir stalls finished between 1658 and 1670, the towering main altar of 1685, the central pulpit by Lodewijk Willemsens in 1675, the communion rails of the holy chapel from 1695 - all of it survived the next great threat to Antwerp's churches: the French Revolutionary armies who occupied the city in 1794. The story preserved in the parish records is specific. A priest of St. James' pledged loyalty to the French and was rewarded with permission to choose one Antwerp church that would not be plundered. He chose his own. The Baroque interior is here today because of one act of pragmatic collaboration that many of his contemporaries surely judged as betrayal.

On 6 December 1630 Peter Paul Rubens married his second wife, Helena Fourment, in this church. He was 53; she was 16. The marriage produced five children before his death from gout ten years later. Rubens's family chapel sits at the eastern end of St. James', and he is buried under its floor. The altarpiece he painted for the chapel - Our Lady Surrounded by Saints, in which the figures are believed to be portraits of Rubens's own family and friends, with Rubens himself as Saint George - was completed shortly before his death and installed five years afterwards. The painting above his tomb is his own. Few painters in Western history are buried beneath their own work in a chapel they themselves furnished. To stand in front of it is to be in the presence of an artist who is curating his own afterlife.

More than 1,300 graves lie within the church, and the records list more than 4,500 burials. Antwerp's nobility competed for chapels along the side aisles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the way Florentine families had competed for chapels in Santa Croce two centuries earlier. The grave of Francisco Marcos de Velasco, sculpted by Pieter Scheemaeckers in 1693, is among the most admired - a recumbent stone figure in Spanish armour. Willem Ignatius Kerricx's monument to Ludovicus van Anthoine, and the marble tombs Guillaume Geefs carved for Henrica van Cornelissen and Eugenia van Ertborn, give later periods their own showpieces. Even the stations of the cross have noble patrons: each of the fourteen 1855 sculptures by Joseph Geefs and P. J. De Cuyper was donated by a specific Antwerp family or office-holder, names that still resonate in the city's history.

The choir organ built by Jean-Baptiste Forceville in 1727 still works, its original mechanical action intact - one of relatively few seventeenth- and eighteenth-century church organs in Belgium that has neither been replaced nor electrified. The newer grand organ, built by Anneessens in 1884 in the Romantic style, is a different instrument for a different repertoire. The older one was played by Henry Bredemers among other musicians; on a quiet weekday morning, the building still fills with the same sound that filled it 300 years ago. The First World War did break some of the stained glass - the windows that perished are commemorated in plaques inside - but the bones of the building, the carving, the painting and the music carry on largely as their seventeenth-century patrons left them.