Stone-Ideas.com 
During the Amsterdam 750 anniversary year, the Rijksmuseum and the Royal Palace in the city team up for the exhibition “Artus Quellinus – Sculptor of Amsterdam“ through October 25, 2025. He decorated the inside and outside of the 17th-century Town Hall (now the Royal Palace Amsterdam) with hundreds of impressive sculptures of gods and goddesses, narratives, symbols, animals and plants.
Artus Quellinus (1609-1668) was the most important sculptor of his time in both Antwerp and the Dutch Republic. His talent, craftmanship and success made him the northern European pendant to Italian artists of that time, such as Gianlorenzo Bernini.
He became particularly famous because of his vast sculptural contribution to the current Palace at the Dam that was inaugurated as the new Amsterdam Town Hall in 1655.
Quellinus worked for fifteen years in a large studio at Keizersgracht and bore the title of “Sculptor of Amsterdam“ with pride. His unequalled style is an amalgamation of the warm realism of the Rubens baroque of his birthplace Antwerp and the tranquillity and harmony of classical and contemporary Italian art he picked up in Rome.
Quellinus was a bright observer and narrator whose works seduce, amaze and affect. That is proven not only by his sculptures for the former town hall, executed in marble and bronze, but also by his natural portrait busts, impressive statues of saints, skilfully modelled terracottas, and refined ivories.
The exhibition unites more than a hundred artworks from national and international museums, churches and private collections. Small, intimate sculptures are presented alongside sizeable works.
Quellinus drew inspiration from Antiquity. In turn, he was an inspiration to famous contemporaries, such as can be seen in works by François du Quesnoy and Lucas Faydherbe, and by successful former assistants such as Rombout Verhulst, Artus II Quellinus, and Josse de Corte (also known as Giusto Le Court). The latter took his adaptation of Quellinus’s style to Venice.
All these works will be on display in Quellinus’s ubiquitous sculpture in the Palace that is both the background and the main character of this exhibition.
This exhibition is realised with the support of among others the Mondriaan Fund, Don
Quixote Foundation, Zabawas, the Netherlands Culture Fund, the Bert and Joos
Mastenbroek Fund/Rijksmuseum Fund, and the government: on behalf of the Minister of
Education, Culture and Science, the Cultural Heritage Agency awarded an indemnity
guarantee.