Hendrick van den Broeck

He was a brother of the sculptor Willem van den Broecke and the painters Joris and Pieter.

In the years 1557 and 1558 he was in Florence where he worked mainly as a glass painter on commissions for Duke Cosimo I de Medici and his court.

The Flemish priest Adriaan de Witte who was chaplain of the guard of the Duke played a role in calling van den Broeck to the Ducal court.

He was commissioned to paint four glass windows in the Sala degli Elementi (Room of the Elements} in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

Adriaan de Witte provided the iconographic program of the glass windows, which included allegories of Envy, Justice and Victory, with mottoes in Latin.

Van den Broeck subsequently worked on glass paintings in the monastery complex of San Lorenzo.

In 1558 van den Broeck supplied painted windows for the choir and the sacristy of San Lorenzo and also the Biblioteca Laurenziana.

He remained active at this location until the early 1560s and worked there alongside another Flemish painter referred to as Gualtieri di Giovanni Battista Fiammingo.

[6] In 1561 he entered into a contract with the Opera of Orvieto Cathedral to provide decoration of the new altars in the nave.

[6] Duke Adriano Montemelini commissioned van den Broeck to paint the Adoration of the Magi (1564, now in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria) for his chapel in the Church of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia.

He likely painted in the chapel the fresco of the Crucifixion with Saints Francis and Herculanus in which he included on the lower right a figure of Francesco Bossi in prayer.

[2] In 1565 he registered in the Confraternita of the Santa Maria della Pietà in Camposanto dei Teutonici, the national church of Germans and Flemish people in Rome.

[11] He worked under Cesare Nebbia to help decorate the Capella Sistina of Santa Maria Maggiore, as well as the better known Sistine Chapel in the Vatican complex, where he painted a Resurrection of Christ on thewall facing of the entrance, where previously there had been a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio which had become damaged.

This does not necessarily contradicted by the fact that Hendrick received a commission for frescoes in Rome in 1579 and was also registered in the Brotherhood of the Flemish community there in December of that year.

During the period from 1580 to 1597 he made frescoes in the Cappella Sisitina in Santa Maria Maggiore (1587) and in the Vatican Library (1589).