Willem van den Broecke, Willem van den Broeck or Guillelmus Paludanus (1530 – 1579) was a Flemish sculptor, painter, draughtsman and architect. He was a scion of a family of artists, which had its origins in Mechelen and some members of which later moved to Antwerp. Willem was active in Antwerp and also worked and likely trained in Italy for a long period. He was known for his small scale works, many of which were executed in alabaster. He was, along with Cornelis Floris, the leading sculptor in Antwerp in the second half of the 16th century. He was also one of the designers of the Antwerp City Hall. He enjoyed the patronage of an elite international clientele of church institutions, Spanish nobility, princes of Protestant territories as well as patricians from Augsburg.
Life
Willem van den Broecke was born in Mechelen as the son of Hendrick van den Broeck, of whom it is not known whether he was an artist. His family members included artists who were active in Mechelen. His family also used the Latinized name 'Paludanus'. The Latinized name is based on the Latin translation ('palus') of the Dutch word 'broeck' (forming part of his family name) which means a marsh or swamp land. He was a brother of the painters Hendrick van den Broeck, Joris and Pieter. The painter Chrispijn van den Broeck was likely a relative. It is not known with whom Willem trained but it is believed he initially trained in his hometown.
Willem likely continued his studies in Antwerp in the workshop of Claudius or Cornelis Floris and may have travelled to Italy before 1557. He may have lived there in Rome and in Florence where his brother worked and in other cities. He was registered as a master sculptor in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in the year 1557. He became a citizen of Antwerp in 1559. In an active career spanning 20 years he developed an international network among the intellectual, artistic and ruling elite of his time. He received commissions from local as well as foreign patrons. The commissions executed for patrons in Augsburg in 1560 were likely shipped from Antwerp rather than created in Augsburg.
In the years 1566 and 1567 he sculpted three figures for the cathedral of Antwerp. He was further able to secure the patronage of the Duke of Alba, the Governor of the Netherlands in the period 1567–1573, and the Duke's court in Brussels. He enjoyed the protection of the Spanish humanist Benito Arias Montano who resided temporarily in Antwerp and helped him with his contacts at the court. In 1571 the Duke of Alba commissioned a larger-than-life statue of himself to commemorate his reconquest of a large part of the Netherlands and in particular his defeat of the rebels at Jemgum in 1568. The monument was executed by Willem van den Broecke and the Antwerp sculptor Jacob Jongheling after a program proposed by Arias Montanus, that was inspired by Piero Valeriano's Hieroglyphica of 1556. The statue was to be placed inside the citadel of Antwerp, which the Duke himself had built earlier. It depicts Alba in the guise of a Christian Hercules. The statue was upon its completion condemned by both the Spanish rulers and the Dutch regime as an improper expression of pride. The pursuit of glory in a ruler - and in particular, a subordinate thereof - was regarded as unbecoming under the Christian and classical principles upheld by the Spanish and Dutch courts. The statue was seen as nothing less than an act of self-glorification by Alba, which bordered on disloyalty. After the Duke was recalled to Spain, the statue was dismantled without pomp in 1574 and subsequently destroyed. Some prints made before the destruction of the statue show what it looked like. Through the Brussels court he also obtained in 1571 a commission to make a reja (stone enclosure or fence) for a monastery in Alba de Tormes. Although he worked on the designs for this project and received several payments for it, it is not clear whether it was ever finished by van den Broecke.
The artist was prosperous and bought in 1567 a plot of land on the Korte Vaartstraat in central Antwerp on which he built a house named De liefde ('Love'). A relief by his hand referred to as The Garden of Eden or Love (collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) is believed to have been part of a chimney piece of his house called De Liefde ('Love'), built by the artist in Antwerp. Van den Broecke later bought the plot adjacent to his home on which he constructed another house.