Focus on Tomb of Ferdinand van den Eynde and analyze the Reception and esteem.
Giovanni Battista Passeri and Giovanni Pietro Bellori praised Duqesnoy's work, and stressed the fame of the Van den Eynde's putti. They enjoyed huge fame in the following centuries, and served as models of the infant putto for contemporary artists.
Bellori wrote:The Greeks were excellent at sculpting and painting the Erotes and the Genii as young boys, and it seems that Callistratus gives a very good description of the putti around the statue of the Nile, and Philostratos does so in his account of the Erotes at play. Michelangelo made putti in both marble and paint, all of them resembling figures of Hercules, devoid of tenderness. Raphael is the first to give them grace and charm: he depicts them in a lively manner, growing in beauty in proportion to their age. Titian and Correggio depicted them more tenderly. Annibale Carracci belonged to that group, and Domenichino is considered excellent. He used them more than any other artist in composition, and shows them in different guises: as babes in swaddling clothes and as adults, with the movements and quality corresponding to the age of each. Francesco the Fleming limited himself more to the tender forms of little children, and in creating this likeness he miraculously advanced the manner, which is now imitated by everyone
andIn Rome, in the church of Santa Maria dell'Anima, he made two tombs which are built up against columns on either side. The one is Ferdinand of van den Eynde's, a gentleman from Antwerp, and the other of Adriaen of the Vrijburgh family of Alkmaar. On the first are two putti which raise a cloth to reveal the inscription. One of them covers part of its head with a cloth as token of sorrow, and it holds the hourglass of death in its hand. This is without doubt the most beautiful little putto to which Francesco's chisel gave life, and sculptors and painters consider it exemplary, together with its companion, who is turned towards him and bows with him as he raises the cloth
Rubens, whose putti may be considered the "painterly pendant" to Duquesnoy's, praised the Van den Eynde putti greatly. In a letter to Duquesnoy, in which he thanks the Fiammingo for the models after the putti of Van den Eynde's epitaph, he writes:I do not know hot to express to you my obligation for the models you have sent me, and for the plaster casts of the two putti for the epitaph of van den Eynde in the Chiesa dell'Anima. Still less can I praise their beauty properly. It is nature, rather than art, that has formed them; the marble is softened into living flesh
Even Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who generally was a critic of the Baroque, commented:Our artists resemble the classical sculptors in the sense that they too do not know how to make beautiful children, and I believe that they prefer to choose a Cupid by Fiammingo [Duquesnoy] to imitate than on by Praxiteles himself. The well-known story about a Cupid that Michelangelo made and then placed alongside one by an old master, in order to teach our generation how excellent the art of the ancients was, proves nothing here, for Michelangelo's children will never move us as deeply as nature itself does. I do not believe that I am overstepping the mark when I say that Fiammingo acted like a new Prometheus, by modelling creaturres that were rarely seen
Many notable artists visited Van den Eynde's tomb in Rome to reproduce his epitaph in drawing and painting. Among the drawings which survived to this day, there are those of Johan Sylvius, Jean-Robert Ango and Augustin Pajou.
Jean-Robert Ango Augustin Pajou Giovanni Battista Passeri Antwerp putti Rome Rubens Santa Maria dell'Anima Giovanni Pietro Bellori Johann Joachim Winckelmann Johan Sylvius