Jean Mone

Jean Mone (born c. 1495, Metz, Lorraine [now in France]—died c. 1548, Mechelen, Flanders [now in Belgium]) was a French sculptor who gained fame for the work he produced in Flanders as court sculptor to Holy Roman emperor Charles V. His work helped introduce the Italian Renaissance style to Flemish sculpture.

Mone worked from 1512 to 1513 in Aix-en-Provence on sculptures for that city’s cathedral. From 1517 to 1519 he collaborated with artist Bartolomé Ordóñez in Barcelona on a choir screen for the cathedral of San Eulalia, and he subsequently lived in Italy for a brief time. About 1522, after this exposure to contemporary, largely Italianate traditions, Mone went to Antwerp, where he became acquainted with prominent artists such as Albrecht Dürer.

During this period, Flemish art was still bound to the traditions of the late Gothic style, and no new, national style had developed as an alternative. Intrigued by the Renaissance art he saw from France and Italy, Charles V attempted to attract foreign artists to the court at Mechelen (Malines). In 1522 he appointed Mone official court sculptor, and the artist began to work on a series of commissions, mostly tombs; he would receive support from the court for the rest of his life. In the late 1520s Mone created an important tomb for Cardinal Guillaume de Cröy in the Celestine church in Heverlee (now in the Capuchin church at Enghien). This alabaster monument—featuring freestanding sculptures, pillars, and reliefs—defied the traditional Gothic form of a stiff, recumbent effigy and instead recalled Venetian wall monuments, which often presented the deceased as a more active, reclining figure. The work was also different from contemporary Flemish sculpture in its graceful, flowing ornamentation, which reflected Renaissance trends. The newness of this style to Flanders was evident in the contrast between the delicacy of Mone’s monument and the heaviness of its architectural surroundings.

In 1533 the artist created one of his best-known works, the alabaster funerary monument for the church of Notre-Dame at Hal, near Brussels. This elaborate altarpiece is most notable for its arrangement of reliefs, which again display Mone’s mastery of delicately carved ornamentation. He continued these explorations in an altarpiece for the church of St. Gudule, in Brussels (1538–41). The overall composition of this monument is more elegant than anything he had created before, and its reliefs display a new sense of freedom and openness.

Mone spent the remainder of his life working in Flanders. Particularly notable are his tombs for Antoine de Lalaing and his wife, Isabeau de Culembourg, which he executed in the 1540s in the church of St. Catherine in Hoogstraten. While the figures exemplify the rigid, recumbent pose of a Gothic sculptural effigy, Mone decorated their garments and surroundings with joyful, unfettered, classical figures and motifs, subtly ushering this most traditional form of funerary monument into a new era of Renaissance inventiveness.