Jacques Jonghelinck
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Jacques Jonghelinck (Antwerp, 21 October 1530 -1606) was a Flemish sculptor and medallist working in Brussels in the Mannerist style common to the Catholic courts of Western Europe. His masterwork, a full-length, over-lifesize bronze of Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, erected in the citadel of Antwerp, was destroyed within a few years of its completion.
He moved from Antwerp to set up a workshop in Brussels in 1562 and was appointed court sculptor the following year.
In Brussels he specialized in funeral monuments for an aristocratic clientele and was also a successful merchant, and financier. He belonged to the immediate entourage of the diplomat Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, president of the council of state from 1556 to 1564.
Jonghelinck was a major patron of Pieter Brueghel whose pictures he kept “in his house located at ter Beken”. They included “sixteen items by Bruegel including the tower of Babylon, a Bearing of the Cross, the Twelve Months...”[1].
He collaborated as sculptor and bronze-founder with the sculptor Joos Aerts in the gilt-bronze and black marble memorial of Charles the Bold (died 1477) in the Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk ("Church of Our Lady") (Bruges), completed in 1563.
Letters between the diplomat Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, who was at that time in Madrid, and his secretary Morillon in Brussels show that Jonghelinck, master medal maker with a workshop in one of the buildings of the palace complex in Brussels, in the spring of 1566 had made a mould for a small medal. Successively he cast medals in lead, tin, copper, silver or gold of the type known as Geuzen medals.
His bronze of Silenus astride a Cask, 1570, is the figure for a fountain in the gardens of the Aranjuez; it replaced Giambologna's Samson and a Philistine,[2] which had been given to Charles, Prince of Wales in 1623, on the ill-fated diplomatic mission over the "Spanish Match".
[edit] References
- Frick Collection, New York: Bust of the Duke of Alba, bronze, dated 1571
- Victoria and Albert Museum: The Spanish Fury at Antwerp, bronze low-relief roundel attributed to Jognhelinck: circa 1580, depicting events of 1576
- Smolderen, Luc, Jacques Jonghelinck: Sculpteur, medailleur et graveur de sceaux (1530-1606) (Louvain, 1996)
- Léon E. Lock, "A brief history of the sculpture in the present-day Netherlands and Belgium" Brief mention of Jonghelinck in context
- Contract for the funeral monument of Count Philipp III von Hanau-Münzenberg (died 1561), 1562
