Description

Phoebus Focus XXVII

The Antwerp Baroque portrait specialist Anthony Van Dyck painted Henricus Liberti in around 1627-1632 as a self-assured and talented musician, who was well aware of his worth. Today, just a handful of Liberti’s musical pieces have been preserved and the archives hardly mention any traces of the life of this Antwerp keyboard virtuoso and composer. We do not even know for sure when and where he was born.

The fact that the musician was not forgotten is largely due to Van Dyck’s magnificent Portrait of Henricus Liberti, which is now part of The Phoebus Foundation’s collection. This Phoebus Focus zooms in on the prestigious history of Van Dyck’s portrait and brings together the details of Liberti’s life and oeuvre. We also focus on the masterly way in which the painter depicted the inspired virtuoso.

Timothy De Paepe (1981) is director of Museum Vleeshuis | Klank van de Stad and research assistant at the University of Antwerp. He previously studied Germanic Linguistics and Literature at the University of Antwerp and Cultural Management at the University of Antwerp Management School (UAMS). He has been working at the University of Antwerp since 2006 and obtained his doctorate there in 2011, with a thesis on theatre and opera in Antwerp in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Phoebus Focus series he previously published Elegant gezelschap in een tuin. Een muzikaal schilderij vol zestiende-eeuwse wijsheid (2019) (Elegant Company in a Garden. A Musical Painting full of Sixteenth-Century Wisdom, 2022).