MILDERT, Johannes van

Flemish sculptor. He was the son of the Antwerp painter Anthoon van Mildert (d. 1597) who had migrated to Königsberg. He was probably the pupil of Willem van den Blocke (c. 1550-1628), another Fleming who had settled in Königsberg.

After the death of his father he went to Antwerp, where he became a master in the Guild of Saint Luke in 1610. He possibly undertook a trip to Rome around 1608. It is believed that after 1620 he spent some time in Paris. He became a citizen of Antwerp in 1628. In Antwerp he became friends with Rubens. When in 1633 Rubens was elected dean of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke he was allowed to leave the actual administration in the hands of van Mildert.

From about 1617 onwards van Mildert received multiple large commissions as a sculptor-architect and maker of small-scale architectural stone church furniture. He thus became the main competitor of the workshop of the brothers Jean and Robert de Nole that had dominated the Antwerp market from the beginning of the seventeenth century.

He initially worked in a Mannerist style. Around 1618 started working in the Baroque style of his friend Rubens. In 1618 he executed a black and white marble altar made for the Chapel Church in Brussels based on a design by Rubens. This structure (now in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode) was the first stone altar in the shape of a porch in the Southern Netherlands. Rubens also commissioned van Mildert to make the famous separation wall with arches in Rubens’s residence in Antwerp. He further executed Rubens’ design for the Waterpoort, a gate that was originally part of the Antwerp defence walls.

Van Mildert played an important role in the development of the design of Flemish Baroque religious furniture. In this area of Baroque sculpture in the Southern Netherlands he made his most important contribution since the quality of his figure sculptures lagged behind his Flemish contemporaries Artus Quellinus and François Duquesnoy. Because of his reputation in this field, he got in 1616 the commission for the design and execution of the main altar of the St. John’s Cathedral in ’s-Hertogenbosch. A drawing and painting of this altar by Pieter Saenredam have been preserved and parts of the altar are now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

His son Cornelis van Mildert (1613-1668) was also a sculptor and draughtsman. His daughter Elizabeth married the sculptor Gerard van Opstal (c. 1594-1668). His son Cornelis and his son-in-law Gerard van Opstal completed some of the works left unfinished at the time of his death.