Head of a Seraph

Entry

This marble head of an angel – a Seraph – was acquired by the Rijksmuseum together with the head of a Cherub (BK-1983-20). While both marbles share the same provenance, they do not form a pair. The present Seraph lacks the refinement and detailing evident in the Cherub, a work convincingly attributed to Artus Quellinus II (1625-1700). Both angels were presumably purchased around the middle or the third quarter of the nineteenth century by a member of the noble Van den Bogaerde van Terbrugge family, who had them embedded in the masonry wall of the entrance hall, stairwell and scullery of Heeswijk Castle, then a family possession.² During a major restoration of the interior of the Sint-Janskathedraal in Den Bosch in the years 1867-69, important furnishings were deemed discordant with the restored Gothic interior and subsequently dismantled and sold.³ In 1869, Baron Louis – or possibly his brother, Baron Donat Albéric – purchased numerous fragments once belonging to the church’s high altar, a work by the Antwerp sculptor Hans van Mildert completed in 1620. As it had always been presumed that the Seraph and Cherub likewise originated from the cathedral’s inventory, they too were attributed to Van Mildert.⁴ The same sculptor also created sculptures for other altars in the cathedral, as documented in the church council’s account books from the early seventeenth century. Accordingly, the present angel’s head was thought to have come from one of these non-extant altars.⁵

Information regarding the contents of the Sint-Janskathedraal’s interior prior to 1629, at which time the church entered Protestant hands, unfortunately provides insufficient grounds to support this assumption. Besides the high altar, other furnishings included an alabaster tabernacle, the monumental rood loft and two smaller altars beneath it.⁶ This Roman Catholic interior also included various wood and stone altarpieces, mainly built by the city’s guilds. Starting in 1629, all of these elements – with the exception of the rood loft – were removed from the church on a systematic basis, with most of the contents subsequently lost.⁷ Exceptions are the crossbow militia guild’s altar of St George, likewise attributed to Van Mildert, and an anonymous altarpiece dedicated to St Sebastian belonging to the longbow militia of Den Bosch. Shortly after their dismantling (after 1638), both altars were moved and reinstalled in the Sint-Amandskerk in Geel (Belgium).⁸ The rood loft was ultimately sold to the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria and Albert Museum) in London in 1869.

A dating of the Seraph around 1630-60 can be made not only on stylistic grounds, but also on the basis of their execution in the material marble.⁹ Moreover, the angel very unlikely came from the cathedral’s possessions, as no altarpieces were built after the Protestant appropriation of the Sint-Janskathedraal in 1629. More probable is that the Seraph originally formed part of one or more discarded Flemish altarpieces or rood screens – for example, relinquished by a Jesuit church following the order’s dissolution in 1773 – acquired by Baron Van den Bogaerde van Terbrugge in the mid-nineteenth century, possibly together with the other Heeswijk Castle fragments today held in the museum’s collection. Since no record exists detailing the 1869 sale of the cathedral’s high altar, one cannot rule out the possibility that the Seraph had already been acquired prior to this time by Baron Andreas van den Bogaerde van Terbrugge, like his sons an avid art collector. In that case, there are no historical grounds to support an attribution to Hans van Mildert.

Stylistically, this ‘adult’ angel is akin to a type common in the Southern Netherlands during the first half of the seventeenth century. The agreement with the work of the Antwerp branch of the De Nole family (the brothers Robrecht and Jan, and the latter’s son Andries) for the basilica of Scherpenheuvel executed in the years 1622-23, is striking. Especially the faces of the angels in the church’s facade, and those of the statues of St John the Evangelist and the prophet Daniel framed in niches of the church’s interior, display a marked similarity to the Amsterdam angel.¹⁰ Moreover, all of these works were executed in white marble, a material that was still rarely used at this time. The facial types of the De Nole’s angels seem to have paved the way for the classical, wood-carved angel’s faces from the middle and second half of the seventeenth century that adorn large numbers of baroque confessional seats in the Southern Netherlands, such as those in the Sint-Pauluskerk and Sint-Jacobskerk in Antwerp.¹¹ Similar works executed in marble, though likewise encountered on altarpieces, rood lofts and tomb monuments, are less common, as in many cases preference was given to ‘child’ angels inspired by François du Quesnoy (1597-1643). Where one does observe a stylistic similarity to the present sculpture are the monumental marble angels by Sebastiaan de Neve (1612-1676) on the rood loft (1659-70) in the aforementioned Sint-Jacobskerk in Antwerp.¹² Not only is there a striking agreement in the face, but also in the full, deeply undercut curls and the form and arrangement of the wing feathers.

Frits Scholten, 2025