Though Van Pede's designs were not accepted, the Sainte Chapelle des Miracles is none the less a perpetual memorial of his genius: the cunningly wrought sculpture which it contains is almost all of it his handiwork. The honoured name of Kelderman too is linked with this building, but that association is now only a memory: the high altar which Peter Kelderman reared has long since been cast down.

But to return to Peter's more famous kinsman, old Anthony Kelderman's second son, Jonkhere Rombold van Marsdale, for thus the honest mason styled himself after Charles V. had ennobled him. Maybe he thought the ancient family name sounded more aristocratic than the name which his great-grandfather had adopted.

Though Rombold was undoubtedly an architect and artist of a very high order, and though he remained to the end of his career a man of energy and enterprise, and at last died in harness, full of years and honours, strangely enough his memory is not kept alive by any monument which he alone can be certainly said to have designed and carried to completion. In his early days he was largely engaged in completing the work of other men, or in adding to, or embellishing, or restoring buildings which already existed. Later on he entered into partnership with Dominic De Waghemakere, and henceforth most of his designs were not the outcome of his unaided genius. Together they planned many glorious structures. Some never got beyond paper, others were commenced and left unfinished, for they lived in troublous times; only a few were brought to completion, and of these but one remains, the Steen of Antwerp, spoilt by restoration.

Rombold Kelderman had honours, riches, renown. His career from this point of view was certainly a most successful one, but an untoward fortune seems to have dogged his steps in the matter of his craft, and this was so not only with his own creations but also with the buildings which he reared and the plans which he made conjointly with Dominic De Waghemakere.

THE STEEN OF ANTWERP.

[ Click to view larger image.]

Thus, for example, he was commissioned by Charles V. to transform the unfinished Cloth Hall of Mechlin into a place of assembly for the Grand Council of Brabant. He drew out plans; they were all that could be desired—the original drawings are preserved amongst the city rolls; somewhere about the year 1529 the foundation stone was laid, and at first the work was pushed on bravely, but before it was half finished came the troubles of Philip's reign and it had to be abandoned, but Rombold grieved not at it, he had long since paid Nature's debt.

Otherwise, and yet more deplorable, was the disaster which baulked the realisation of Kelderman and De Waghemakere's magnificent scheme for the reconstruction of the choir of Antwerp Cathedral.