Antoon van den Heuvel

In the declaration he made when he was admitted as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke of Ghent in 1628, he stated that in the previous 10 years he had been working in Antwerp and Rome.

[1] His Lamentation in the Church of Borsbeke relies upon a painting by the Dutch Carravagist Gerard van Honthorst of the same subject for its composition and a number of motifs.

But compared to his contemporary Jan Janssens, one of the foremost representatives of the Ghent Caravaggisti, Antoon van den Heuvel rarely showed Caravaggesque elements.

Only in one work, 'Mary with the Christ Child and the Rosary' of 1634 (Church of Nazareth, Belgium, he adopted one of the motifs of Caravaggio: 'The Madonna with the snake' (Rome, Galleria Borghese).

The paintings (some of them after designs by Rubens) that he (and other painters) made on the occasion of the Joyous Entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria in Ghent in 1635 were engraved to be included in a publication authored by Willem van der Beke (Guilielmus Becanus).