St Peter

Entry

From 1650 to 1665, the Flemish sculptor Artus Quellinus I (1609-1668) lived in Amsterdam, where he oversaw the sculptural decoration of the town hall under construction. During this time, he maintained his connections with his native city of Antwerp, visited the city multiple times (documented are visits in 1655, 1658 and 1659), and continued to receive commissions from various patrons there.² When unable to travel to Antwerp himself, his older brother, the painter Erasmus Quellinus II, assumed the role of intermediary. In this capacity, on 14 September 1656, Erasmus signed a contract ‘representing in name Sr Artus Quellinus, his brother’, for two marble statues – one of St Francis Xavier, the other of St Ignatius of Loyola – destined for the choir of the Jesuit church in Antwerp. Quellinus subsequently sculpted these saintly statues in his Amsterdam workshop, where both were seen there by Joost van den Vondel and featured in two of his laudatory poems.

Most likely Quellinus also sculpted the large marble statue of St Peter (fig. a) for the tomb monument of the Antwerp merchant Pieter Saboth for the Antwerp Sint-Andrieskerk in his Amsterdam workshop. Viewed as one of Quellinus’s most important and influential works in his native city, in 1930 Gabriels described it as ‘one of the most remarkable religious statues that Flanders possesses, in part because of its reserved character and the absence of “false heroism”’.³ The present terracotta presentation model in the Rijksmuseum is one of two surviving preliminary studies for this apostle statue.

While undocumented when he received and executed the commission, it was traditionally assumed Quellinus sculpted the marble St Peter in Antwerp in 1658-1659. However, new insights into his travel movements and workshop practice do not support this theory.⁴ On 11 July 1658, immediately after Saboth’s death on 7 July, Quellinus was in Antwerp in order to purchase two country houses in Hoboken. But is has been overlooked that twenty days later the sculptor is again mentioned in Amsterdam archival documents when accepting the commission for the tympanum of the town hall’s rear façade.⁵ It is unlikely that the commission for the St Peter had already been bestowed on Quellinus in the short intervening period (let alone that he had already completed this monumental statue by this time). As kerkmeester (church warden) of the Sint-Andrieskerk, his brother Erasmus might have been influential in the granting the commission to him at a later date, presumably in 1659. Noteworthy is that Artus made a donation of 10 guilders and 16 stuivers in 1659 to the church on the occasion of the purchase of his country houses he had acquired the previous year.⁶ This might be interpreted as a token of gratitude for having received the commission.

Like his two saintly statues for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, not to mention all his other international commissions produced during those years, the monumental St Peter would simply have been executed in his Amsterdam workshop. Moreover, the large block of white Carrara marble he required was far more readily available in Amsterdam – the most important stockpile of Italian marble in northern Europe – than in Antwerp.⁷

Petrus Saboth likely left all his possessions to the Sint-Andrieskerk because he had no direct heirs (wife and children).⁸ After deducting debts and obligations, his estate amounted to a total of 12,613 guilders, allocated to the building of the church’s transept as stipulated in his will.⁹ The executors of Saboth’s will – Canon Carolus Snyers and Joannes van Woonsel – decided to reserve 900 guilders for a funeral monument in memory of the generous benefactor. For this purpose, the two men approached Artus Quellinus: ‘So has Peeter Sabahot [sic] bequeathed all his possessions by testament to this church of Sint Andries [sic] whose epitaph stands on the mother pillar of the large northern bay representing the image of the holy Peter, prince of the Apostles Christi Stadhauder [sic], mourning His Fall in white marble by the esteemed sculptor Artus Quillinus [sic].’¹⁰ Quellinus produced what is today known as a ‘didactic commemorative monument’: a monument that memorialized the deceased person only indirectly – in the form of a patron saint, or in some cases, a suitable religious scene – with prime importance placed on the work’s didactic value as a religious artwork and decorative element in the church interior.¹¹ In the seventeenth-century, this Flemish grave type came to be especially popular in Antwerp. The Saboth monument consists of a white marble statue of St Peter standing on a later, black marble pedestal with a white marble plate that bears the Latin epitaph. The inscription commemorates the founding of the monument at the instigation of the two executors of the sculptor’s will. Quellinus chose to depict St Peter with his three main attributes: the keys to heaven and hell, his inverted martyr’s cross, and the crowing rooster alluding to his denial of Christ. The monument was originally mounted on a pillar above Saboth’s grave in the church’s south transept. With the construction of a new choir and altar in 1769, it was moved to its present location in the north transept. At this time, the pedestal and inscription plate were also added.

Besides the inevitable influence of Rubens,¹² Quellinus’s St Peter reflects the sculptor’s knowledge of classical sculpture and insights garnered from his time in Rome (1635-1639). For the apostle’s head, he was inspired by the so-called Head of Seneca (‘pseudo-Seneca’), a famous classical bust of which Rubens also possessed a copy. This sculpture figures several times in the painter’s work, for example, when displayed in a rear wall niche in The Four Philosophers, Rubens’s self-portrait of circa 1611 that shows the artist standing at a table where his son, Philips Rubens, Justus Lipsius and Johannes Woverius are seated (Florence, Palazzo Pitti).¹³ Another parallel for the statue is found in Giuliano Finelli’s St Peter in de Duomo of Naples (c. 1635-40).¹⁴ With respect to the daring integration of Peter’s (inverted) cross, Quellinus was undoubtedly inspired by the highly expressive St Andrew conceived by his teacher François du Quesnoy in 1629-40 (St Peter’s Basilica),¹⁵ but even more so by Michelangelo’s marble Risen Christ in the Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, in which the Christ figure stands proudly embracing his cross.

The two surviving preliminary studies of Quellinus’s St Peter deviate not only from one another, but also clearly diverge from the statue ultimately executed in marble. Compared to its counterpart in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels (fig. b), the Amsterdam model is notably smaller.¹⁶ Where the Brussels study is hollowed out and unfinished on the reverse, the present terracotta is modelled in the round. Other differences include the size and positioning of the cross, the positioning of Peter’s feet, the treatment of the drapery folds of Peter’s robe and the rooster’s head. Both works demonstrate that Quellinus sought to find a certain liveliness in the otherwise static figure of St Peter. This he achieved primarily by introducing the monumental cross as an abstract compositional element to counterbalance the figure’s pose.

While clearly a challenge, Quellinus’s attempt to incorporate the inverted cross obliged him to seek a balance between this visually dominant motif and the figure of the apostle. The two terracotta studies clearly show how Quellinus aimed to enhance the sculpture’s three-dimensionality by lengthening the vertical element of the cross, while extending the arms of the cross farther into the surrounding space. In this respect, the Amsterdam terracotta represents a phase more closely approaching the executed marble in its final state. The small format and fully completed finishing – the rendering on the reverse is a bit more summary than in front, with two visible aeration holes – suggest the terracotta likely had the status of a vidimus, i.e. a work presented to Quellinus’s patrons, both to garner their approval but also providing tangible proof of the agreed design.

When comparing the terracotta to preliminary studies that Quellinus made for the Amsterdam town hall, the work of the same hand become evident. Perhaps most telling, however, are Peter’s clasped hands, with the two middle fingers of the left hand held between the middle fingers of the right hand. Besides the Brussels modello and the final executed marble, the same idiosyncratic detail also appears in Quellinus’s relief of Seleucus, made for the town hall’s Vierschaar (for the model, see BK-AM-51-23).

The statue of St Peter is one of Quellinus’s best-known and most highly praised compositions. In Antwerp, it was copied on a regular basis.¹⁷ A wooden St Peter for a confessional in the choir ambulatory of Antwerp Cathedral is attributed to Willem Ignatius Kerricx (1682-1745). A terracotta modello survives of this work, which can essentially be qualified as a mirror-image, more extrovert version of the Saboth monument.¹⁸ Walter Pompe produced numerous sculptures of St Peter inspired by Quellinus’s original, including a statue in the church in Waalre and another variant that dates from 1759, made for the church of Dommelen, with the terracotta modello today preserved at the Sint-Andrieskerk in Antwerp.¹⁹ In the same church one also finds an anonymous wooden St Peter from the second half of the seventeenth century. The life-size limewood statue of St Peter in the Louvre can be classified in the same category of Quellinus-inspired copies from the seventeenth century made in Antwerp.²⁰ Lastly, a chalk drawing of the St Peter is preserved in Vienna (Albertina).²¹

The most engaging echo of the Saboth monument was a short-lived statue made of snow, erected in Antwerp in the winter of 1670, a work praised in Mathias Fourmenois’s Den Gheestelijcken Val-hoet published in that same year.²²

Frits Scholten, 2025