sculpture

Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands

Willem Kerricx

About this work

Object details

TitleMaximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands
Date1694
Mediummarble
Measurements115,5 × 72,5 × 47 cm, 361,5kg
Inventory number678

More about this work

Princely governor in marble This is plainly a man of some distinction: Maximilian II Emmanuel (1662–1726) was Elector of Bavaria and governor of the Southern Netherlands from 1691 until he was ousted in 1706. The marble bust dates from the period of his governorship. It shows him in his military uniform, his marshal’s baton resting casually on his left arm and with the chain of the prestigious chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece on his chest. His armour is decorated with miniature portraits of exemplary Roman emperors, and his princely cloak is trimmed with ermine and fine lace at the neck and wrists. The sculptor Willem Kerricx was brilliant at rendering such refined details, and this sculpture was both a genuine career highlight and a precursor of the eighteenth-century Rococo style. The governor wears a curly, French-style wig and strikes a contrived, spiral pose, with his hand on his hip and his torso rotated. The sculpture was commissioned by the Guild of St Luke, the professional association of Antwerp artists, for which it paid Kerricx the sum of 800 guilders, a substantial amount at the time. A year earlier, on 21 February 1693, Kerricx had shown a model of the piece to Maximilian II Emmanuel during a visit to the guild, of which the sculptor was the dean. The bust was intended to thank the governor for his patronage. The academy of art was later founded under the guild’s auspices, and from the academy museum the Royal Museum of Fine Arts or KMSKA was born.