page_title: Lucas Faydherbe
section_title: Sculpture
hierarchical_section_title: Lucas Faydherbe / Work / Sculpture
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Het grafmonument van aartsbisschop Andreas Cruesen Sint-Romboutskathedraal te Mechelen, België
context_page_description: Lucas Faydherbe was a Flemish sculptor and architect who played a major role in the development of the High Baroque in the Southern Netherlands.
context_section_description: Faydherbe started his career at a crucial moment in the history of Flemish sculpture. In the first place, there was the religious context. The churches in Flanders had been emptied of their decorations by the iconoclasts in the 16th century and the Roman Catholic Contrareformation demanded that artists created paintings and sculptures in church contexts that would speak to the illiterate rather than to the well-informed.  The Contrareformation stressed certain points of religious doctrine, as a result of which certain church furniture, such as the confessional gained an increased importance.  These developments caused a sharp increase in the demand for religious sculpture.  Secondly, the sculptors Jerôme Duquesnoy the Younger and Artus Quellinus the Elder who had worked in Rome in the workshop of François Duquesnoy had returned to work in Flanders in the 1640s and realized many projects that introduced the classicizing Baroque style developed by François Duquesnoy.  They revolutionized the role of the sculptor from that of an ornamentalist to that of an independent creator of art works that replaced the individual architectural elements by an artwork that united sculpture and painting into an harmonic ensemble.  Rubens, the leading Baroque painter in Flanders, also subscribed to the idea of the unity of the arts of sculpture and painting and this is the reason of his association with sculptors such as Johannes van Mildert, Georg Petel and Faydherbe.
  Thanks to his training under Rubens, Faydherbe had learned to assimilate and translate Rubens’ style into sculpture.
  Faydherbe’s early work following his return to Mechelen in 1640 showed a strong influence from Rubens.  During this early period he created some large sculptures for churches in Mechelen and Brussels.  The statues are characterized by a somewhat solemn monumentality: heavy draperies with a few but large folds that completely hide the body, with little detail and almost no differentiation in the representation of the different substances.  A typical example is the statue of St. Andrew in Brussels Cathedral.
  Faydherbe quickly became an artist in demand and he worked on many commissions.  During his second style period (roughly between 1645 and 1655) he developed a more personal expression.  His work became more plastic and was characterized by a richer and more refined design and an increased expressiveness. His work during this period succeeded in portraying persons in a more humane and psychologically sensitive manner.  During this period he made mainly sculptures of men and he created a representational type, which is characterized by its broad and powerful conception without, however, becoming very monumental.
  During Faydherbe’s final stylistic phase, which started around 1655, his talents reached their peak. This expressed itself, among other things, in his creation of two new types of statues and in the soulful depiction of the male figure. In the St. Rumbold's Cathedral in Mechelen each type is demonstrated in the tomb monument of Archbishop Cruesen. On the right is Christ, a beautiful statue that still literally refers to Rubens while on the left there is the statue of Chronos, or Time (referring to Death), which is a very personal creation of Faydherbe.  Chronos is depicted as an old man with his clothes tightly draped around his body which emphasizes the verticality of the statue. The head is slightly turned and creates a particularly expressive tension without the artist having to rely on grand gestures or facial expressions. This statue of Chronos shows a characteristic aspect of Faydherbe’s style which relied more on verticality in contrast to the broad and voluminous forms related to Rubens’ style. This type of the old man was used by Faydherbe repeatedly.
  The second type of statue that Faydherbe created in his final period is exemplified by the statue of the Madonna with the infant Jesus of c. 1675, in the Rockoxhuis in Antwerp. The statue has a flowing movement and the expressions of the faces are very natural and human as if representing a real l
caption: Funeral monument of archbishop Andreas Creusen, St. Rumbold's Cathedral, Mechelen
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