Count Lamoral
de la Tour et Tassis

A funerary chapel and
a family propaganda campaign

Count Lamoral de Tassis (or di Tasso), hereditary postmaster of Holy Roman Empire, supervised his European activities from Brussels, where his family business had sought to increase their social recognition within the local aristocracy. Fortunately, the Count was able to prove his lineage from the formerly sovereign house ‘della Torre’ upon which the King of Spain and the Emperor granted the Count permission to add this name to his own. Count Lamoral then had his family chapel in the Sablon Church reconstructed, hoping that this would favour his being promoted to the rank of prince. He was not given the title, although it was accorded to his son Eugène in 1695. At the beginning of the 18th century, the Tour et Tassis family relocated their seat to Frankfurt and definitively Germanised their name to von Thurn und Taxis.

The sculptor-architect Lucas Faydherbe drew plans for the chapel in 1651. It was completed in 1676 by Vincent Anthony, architect and engineer to the Court of Brussels, who presumably adapted the initial design. The statuary was the work of the best sculptors of the time in the Southern Netherlands: Jérôme Duquesnoy the Younger, Jan van Delen, Gabriel Grupello and Mattheus van Beveren.