RKD STUDIES

Duquesnoy and Spierincks remained in Rome throughout their mature careers. In a fitting end to their long friendship, Duquesnoy, along with their housemate Jean-Baptiste Claessens, executed the inventory of Spierincks’ estate in 1639 and probably saw to his friend’s burial near the high altar in Campo Santo.¹ Cousin and Sweerts eventually left Rome and returned to prosperous careers in Brussels. Sweerts went on to found his own drawing academy, the first of its kind in the Southern Netherlands, and Cousin, whose story began this article, worked as a painter and tapestry designer for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. There, he produced the monumental Venus Mourning Adonis [17], a work that aptly reflects the pictorial language of the antique that he first developed alongside Duquesnoy and Spierincks years earlier. In an expansive wooded landscape encircled by tender putti, Cousin rendered Venus and Adonis with elongated limbs and close-fitting drapery. The painting embodies Cousins stylistic maturity after three decades in Rome, with a softness of form, tender features and quiet emotionality that give way to his elegant classicism.

Throughout their decades in Rome, Cousin, Duquesnoy, Spierincks, and Sweerts integrated themselves into the city’s artistic and cultural fabrics in various ways, charting a different course than many of their fellow Fiamminghi. They sought opportunity through each other and invested in Rome’s institutions and professional networks, supported by friendship, shared interests, and ambitions. The strategies they followed had parallels with other artistic communities like the Bentvueghels, whose members similarly strove for success in a foreign city, yet as Catholic artists with cultural, artistic, and religious backgrounds in Brussels, they possessed certain advantages to achieve distinctive positions in Rome’s artistic milieu. The networks they formed, which were sustained over long periods of time, were complex and fluid, indicative of personal and collective experiences. Characterized by elements of trust, brotherhood, and a local sense of patria, these Brussels artists help to broaden and complicate our image of Netherlandish artists abroad, and ask us to consider not only a Flemish identity, but also a Brussels one, and the myriad ways in which those threads intersected in the 17th century.

17
Louis Cousin
Venius mourning Adonis, c. 1655-1657
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv./cat.nr. GG 1705