A familiar narrative around the Brussels sculptor François du Quesnoy (1597-1643), known in Rome as il Fiammingo, goes something like this: despite being Flemish by birth, suffering various personal and professional difficulties, and producing a relatively small oeuvre, the sculptor achieved enormous success in seventeenth-century Rome. His famed putti were among the most admired and copied sculptures of the period, and works like the Saint Susanna (c. 1630, Santa Maria di Loreto) and the Saint Andrew (1633-1640, St. Peter’s Basilica) earned him an esteemed place alongside his Italian contemporaries, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Alessandro Algardi. This Italian-driven narrative has largely defined the understanding of François du Quesnoy, while at the same time contributing to broader lacunae around the family of sculptors and local artistic environment in Brussels that shaped him as a young artist and thereafter.
Géraldine Patigny’s monumental monograph on the lives and careers of the du Quesnoy dynasty of Brussels sculptors – which, ironically, François has long overshadowed – fills this sizable gap in the scholarship.[1] Emerging from her 2020 dissertation at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Une odyssée baroque is decidedly not about François, who has been the subject of several monographs, but rather his father and founder of the dynasty, Jérôme the Elder (c. 1570-1650), and his brother, the sculptor Jérôme the Younger (1602-1654).[2] Though François appears throughout the text as a supporting actor, Patigny’s primary aim is to reconstruct the careers, oeuvres, and workshop practices of the lesser studied father and son, including the first catalogue raisonné of their works. She anchors their production within the corporative context of the Quatre Couronnés, the guild comprising sculptors, stonecutters, masons, slate workers, and woodworkers, which was responsible for overseeing the profession in Brussels. Supported by extensive archival research and meticulous visual analysis, Patigny’s book offers a nuanced reassessment of the place of Brussels sculpture in the art of the early modern Low Countries and demonstrates how essential the medium was to the history of the Flemish Baroque.
The enormity of this undertaking should not be underestimated. Patigny’s wealth of new archival finds, including tracing works that do not survive but are known only through documents, provides a more complete picture of the output of the du Quesnoy family. Given that only seven of Jérôme the Elder’s sculptures are extant, and less than two dozen by Jérôme the Younger, this reconstructed history is invaluable for illustrating the depth and breadth of the workshop’s activities. As Patigny shows, the du Quesnoy produced works for the Habsburg court, Brussels’s civic institutions, and numerous churches and religious orders in the city and its environs throughout the first half of the seventeenth century. She presents a lively, dynamic view of the workshop as a whole, while also drawing out each sculptor’s individual artistic identities. In this respect, her study contributes to a recent growing field of scholarship on Brussels artists, such as Denijs van Alsloot, Michael Sweerts, Theodoor van Loon, and Michaelina Wautier, primarily all painters.[3]
Une odyssée baroque begins with a preface by Frits Scholten, Head of the Department of Sculpture at the Rijksmuseum, which frames Patigny’s study as a righting of the wrongs that have plagued the reputations of du Quesnoy father and son. Patigny’s own brief introduction follows, progressing into three lengthy and well-illustrated chapters organized around the pillars of family, workshop, and artistic context. The first chapter untangles the biographical narratives of the du Quesnoy family and establishes pivotal themes like mobility and adaptability for their artistic successes. Jérôme the Elder was an immigrant from nearby Béthune in northern France, who arrived in the Habsburg court city in 1595. This proved to be an opportune moment that coincided with the arrival of Archduke Albert, and shortly thereafter by Archduchess Isabella, as well as a burst of artistic projects driven by the Counter-Reformation. By 1608, Jérôme the Elder established his own workshop in the Putterie neighborhood of Brussels, where he trained his sons and a small number of apprentices. François, as is well known, left for Rome in 1618 with the support of Albert and Isabella, whereas Jérôme the Younger remained until 1619, before setting off for Italy, and likely Spain and Portugal. He rejoined François in Rome in 1641 after a brief stay in Florence. The brothers journeyed towards Paris in 1643, but François died in Livorno from an illness. Jérôme the Younger returned to Brussels that year and rose to become the most important sculptor working in the city.
Patigny demonstrates both here and in later chapters how Jérôme the Younger occupied a pivotal touchpoint between the art of his father in Brussels and the antique and Italian traditions that he experienced throughout his travels abroad. Despite his successes, however, Jérôme’s fate has been tied to his misdeeds: when working on the funerary monument for Bishop Anton Triest in Ghent in 1654, in what was his most significant and culminating commission, the sculptor was charged with the crime of sodomy and sentenced to be strangled and burned at the stake. Patigny carefully lays out the facts around the incident and its historiography, addressing early biographers’ and later scholars’ dismissal of the artist’s career because of it (22). In her conclusion, she refers to this as an instance of a “precocious cancel culture” (281). Nevertheless, by contending with this complicated and disturbing history directly, Patigny moves on from it for the remainder of the book and is able to reconstitute Jérôme’s artistic career. Pulling apart myth, fact, and the preconceived notions that have shaped these artists’ lives becomes a thread throughout the book.
Chapter Two turns to the Quatre Couronnés (Guild of the Four Crowned Saints), exploring how deeply the guild informed sculpture practice in Brussels, as well as its social, economic, and public life (60). While Patigny acknowledges that lacunae still exist, her examination of various sources, including the last remaining guild regulations from 1674 (Appendix 95), alongside comparative examples such as the sculpture workshop of the de Nole family in Antwerp, provides an immensely thorough picture of how sculpture production functioned in this period. The guild played a role in the training of apprentices, the running and organization of workshops, and the professional activities of its members. It also attended to their welfare later in life, from which Jérôme the Elder benefited (60). Unlike in Antwerp where sculptors belonged to the Guild of St. Luke as practitioners of the liberal arts, in Brussels, sculptors were associated with the mechanical arts. This designation had real-life consequences, most notably in that drawing did not constitute part of a sculptor’s training, relying instead upon designs made by other artists (or, alternatively, three-dimensional models). The structure of court patronage amplified this practice; artists like Wenzel Coebergher and Jacques Francart, appointed as court architects and engineers in 1605 and 1622, respectively, often provided Jérôme the Elder with models for court commissions. An indication of the changing status of the sculptor over the course of the century is evident in the appointment of Jérôme the Younger as court sculptor and architect in 1651, which gave him more autonomy over his projects.
The second half of this sizable chapter turns to the character and activities of the du Quesnoy workshop specifically. Patigny notes that Jérôme the Elder’s status as a master sculptor permitted him certain privileges. For example, while the guild restricted the number of apprentices a master could have at any given time (for a period of three to four years), the entry of Pauwel Ghy as an apprentice in 1611, followed by François in 1611-1612, and later Jérôme in 1616, indicates that exceptions were granted (61, 74). During their apprenticeships, both sons would have assisted their father on commissions and experienced the management of the workshop. For the latter, Patigny raises the small but notable point that it may have been Élisabeth Van Mechelen, the wife of Jérôme the Elder, who helped to administer the workshop’s activities.
In the final sections of this chapter, Patigny addresses patterns of collaboration and specialization in the du Quesnoy workshop, as well as the use of different materials, including terracotta, wood, stone (alabaster, limestone from Avesnes, marble, touchstone), and papier mâché. Some of these choices were necessitated by the demands of the commission. In other circumstances, they may be understood as what Patigny describes as “a particular aptitude to realize certain elements,” rather than just specializations (82). To illustrate this point she discusses, among other examples, Jérôme the Elder’s large-scale Tabernacle of the Eucharist in Aalst completed in 1604. We learn that the commission developed over multiple years, and involved stonemasons, carpenters, painters, and a local, onsite sculptor. Notable in this context are also the additional activities performed by the du Quesnoy workshop, such as the restoration of sculpture and other monuments. Here, further distinctions emerge with François, whose rehabilitation of antique sculpture in Rome is distinguished from the cleaning and maintenance of sculpture more typically performed by his father in Brussels.
Chapter Three, “Art at the Crossroads,” is one of Patigny’s most revealing. She confronts the relationship between sculpture and painting and the concept of “sculpture rubénienne” (153), challenging the long-maintained view that Flemish sculpture was inextricably linked to the painterly inspiration provided by Peter Paul Rubens. While not discounting the significant role that (antique) sculpture played in Rubens’s art on the one hand, and the impact he had on contemporary sculpture on the other, she deftly recontextualizes these dynamics by taking sculpture on its own terms. A strength of this chapter is her close formal analysis of the works themselves, particularly those lesser known such as Jérôme the Elder’s Mary Magdalene, made for a grotto in the Brussels palace garden, and the marble Saint Anne and the Virgin, likely his earliest work, in the Antwerp Cathedral. Patigny returns to Jérôme’s tabernacle in Aalst, placing it in relation to works by predecessors like Cornelis Floris. She also discusses the beloved bronze Mannekin Pis sculpture within a lineage of putti, including precedents by the sculptor Jean Mone in the Coudenberg palace that du Quesnoy would have known. The treatment of Jérôme the Younger’s series of apostles for the Brussels Cathedral in the mid-1640s is especially illuminating. Here one grasps his creativity as a sculptor, evident in the dynamism of the figures, rendering of their faces and naturalistic drapery, and sense of movement. A side effect of this discussion is a new perspective on François’s putti, which, while undoubtedly inspired by the experiences he had in Rome, can also be seen in relation to the work of his father and a tradition of the putto in the North.
Patigny concludes this chapter by teasing out differences in style and handling between the work of Jérôme and his brother, evident in the close visual reading of Jérôme’s Saint Ursula and the Ganymede and the Eagle in relation to François’s Saint Susanna (250-251). Through these kinds of analyses, Patigny defines and nuances the idea of a dynasty of individual sculptors. Whereas François strove for a Greek antique ideal, Jérôme responded to other examples he saw in Florence, such as the work of Giambologna and Pietro Tacca. The culmination of these experiences emerges in the works he executed in Brussels in the late 1640s and early 1650s, including the Portrait Bust of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Saint Anne and the Virgin in Brussels Cathedral, and ultimately the funerary monument to Bishop Triest. These works display his ingenuity as a sculptor and merging of Flemish, Italian, and antique elements.
The second half of the book contains the catalogue raisonné of the work of Jérôme the Elder and Jérôme the Younger, and a series of appendices – 95 in total – that transcribe archival documents tracing the workshop’s commissions, payments, contracts, and family histories. As in the catalogue entries, these sources are clearly organized and described and will serve as valuable resources for future scholars. The last two appendices contain short, technical essays by Laurent Fontaine and Judy de Roy on the technical analysis of alabaster in Jérôme the Elder’s works, and one by Camille De Clercq on the use of polychrome by the artist Jan van Benthem in the Aalst tabernacle. These illuminating essays not only attest to the book’s publication in the Scientia Artis series produced by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels, but they also support Patigny’s own emphases on the technical character and material properties of sculpture that appear throughout her text. The excellent photographs offer close-up images of the works themselves, some midway through restoration.
Together these contributions reinforce a core argument of the book: understanding sculpture through the conditions of its making and materiality. In this regard, Patigny’s study is comparable to what Jennifer Montagu accomplished in her Roman Baroque Sculpture: The Industry of Art from 1989, showing us, through archival documents, socio-economic conditions, and the works themselves, the place and significance of the sculptor in his own context. These issues should be as relevant to us today as they were to sculptors and patrons in the seventeenth century. Une odyssée baroque allows us to appreciate and understand the richness and complexity of Brussels sculpture and the sophisticated and highly productive enterprise of the du Quesnoy dynasty.
Lara Yeager-Crasselt
Baltimore Museum of Art
[1] Patigny makes a point early in the book to clarify her use of “du Quesnoy” as opposed to variations of the name that appear in the scholarship: “du Quesnoy” appears most frequently – though not exclusively – in the signatures of the sculptors themselves (13).
[2] For François du Quesnoy, see: Mariette Fransolet, François du Quesnoy, sculpteur d’Urbain VIII 1597-1643 (Brussels: Mémoires de l’Académie royale de Belgique, classe des Beaux-Arts, 1942); Marion Boudon-Machuel, François Du Quesnoy 1697-1643 (Paris: Arthena, 2005); and Estelle Lingo, François Duquesnoy and the Greek Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. The du Quesnoy family was the subject of a monograph by Lydie Hadermann-Misguich, Les du Quesnoy (Gembloux, 1970).
[3] Sabine van Sprang, Denijs van Alsloot (vers 1568-1625/26): peintre paysagiste au service de la cour des archidcus Albert et Isabelle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); Lara Yeager-Crasselt, Michael Sweerts (1618-1664): Shaping the Artist and the Academy in Rome and Brussels (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015); Sabine van Sprang (eds.), Theodoor van Loon (Brussels Bozar Books, 2018); Katlijne van der Stighelen (eds.), Michaelina Wautier 1604-1689: Glorifying a Forgotten Talent (Kontich: BAI Publishers, 2018); and most recently, Rudy Jos Beerens, Painters and Communities in Seventeenth-Century Brussels: A Social History of Art (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2024).