Head of a Cherub

Entry

Stylistically, this head of a Cherub falls seamlessly in line with other works by the Antwerp sculptor Artus Quellinus II (1625-1700). The same cannot be said of a second angel’s head – a Seraph (BK-1983-19) – sharing the same provenance, acquired simultaneously by the Rijksmuseum. Characteristic of the faces of Quellinus’s angels and putti are the calligraphically modelled, wavy locks of hair, highly defined eyelids, the diminutive spout-shaped mouth, projecting chin and the dimples at the corners of the mouth. These traits can be observed, for example, on the angels adorning his tomb monument for Abbess Anne-Catherine de Lamboy (Hasselt, Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, 1668), the angels on the altar of the Antwerp cooper’s guild (Antwerp, Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, c. 1672-73), the angel accompanying God the Father (Bruges, Sint-Salvatorskerk, 1680-82), and that on the epitaph of Louis Le Candèle (Antwerp, Sint-Jacobskerk, c. 1691).² The present marble Cherub is a fragment most likely once adorning a monumental marble altarpiece, or less probable, a tomb monument or rood loft.

The nineteenth-century historical provenance of the present angel’s head gave rise to the presumption that it originally came from Sint-Janskathedraal in Den Bosch. During a major renovation of the church’s interior in the years 1867-69, aimed to restore the unity of the medieval-era architecture, important pieces of the furnishings were dismantled and sold because they were deemed discordant with the preserved Gothic interior. Dozens of elements from the early-seventeenth-century high altar and perhaps those of other smaller altars were acquired in 1869 by the collector Baron Louis van den Bogaerde van Terbrugge – or possibly his brother, Baron Donat Albéric - and subsequently embedded in the entrance hall, stairwell and scullery of Heeswijk Castle, then in the family’s possession.³ Embedded in the wall of the castle’s entrance hall until 1975, the present Cherub was presumed to be a fragment from a furnishing the cathedral’s interior, having once formed part of a now lost, unknown altar – a finding ultimately unsubstantiated by tangible proof.⁴ On the contrary, the cathedral’s history in fact precludes this provenance. Immediately following the appropriation of the Sint-Janskathedraal by the Protestants in 1629, all of the Roman Catholic furnishings – with the exception of the high altar and the rood loft – were systematically dismantled and removed,⁵ with no new altars obviously built until the Roman Catholics’ return to the Sint-Janskathedraal in the early nineteenth century. Certain to have been carved long after 1629, the Amsterdam marble Cherub could not have belonged to the cathedral’s inventory, that is, unless it belonged to the Marbre Althaar (marble altar) from the former Jesuit church of Liège, acquired and installed in the cathedral in 1822.⁶

Frits Scholten, 2025