Rare Medal By Steven Van Herwijck - 1559 - On The Back Rare Plaquette Isaac Blessing Jacob

Rare medal by Steven Cornelisz. van Herwijck (Utrecht c. 1530–London 1565/67) representing "Jacobus Fabius" at the age of 40, in 1559. The medal is present in the catalog of Victor Tourneur in 1921 (Le Médailleur Anversois Steven Van Herwijck, in Revue Belge de Numismatique et de Sigillographie, cat n°8, reproduced plate II.) The author lists just one single-sided lead examplar in the collections of the British Museum, but this does not appear in the database museum collections. He also suggests seeing Jacob Bonaert, an Antwerp notable, as “Jacobus Fabius”.
Victor Tourneur's article can be consulted here: http://www.numisbel.be/1921_3.pdf

On the reverse is a beautiful contemporary plaquette, also extremely rare, representing Isaac blessing Jacob. This plaquette is listed by Ingrid Weber (Deutsche, Niederländische und Französische Renaissance-plaketten, 1975, cat n°314, see last photos) on the basis of a single known examplar kept at the Louvre museum, see here: https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010114667
If the composition is identical (and strongly inspired by Raphael in the Vatican Loggias), the dimensions are different and we also notice very numerous variations in the details between the plaquette of the Louvre and this one. Moreover, if Ingrid Weber proposed to locate its origin in Nuremberg, taking into account the rarity of the plaquette, this medal could suggest an Antwerp origin which is otherwise entirely stylistically plausible.

Finally, even if the subject of the plaquette refers to the first name of the character represented on the face, the fact that it could be the original reverse of the medal seems excluded because the composition is more similar to an independent plaquette than to a coin-reverse and the style is too different. Moreover, Steven van Herwijck produced a large quantity of single-sided medals (see Tourneur's catalogue) and a happy association seems much more probable.

Diameter: 76mm