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(2) Alessandro Abondio
(b c. 1580; d Munich, bur 29 April 1648). Son of (1) Antonio Abondio. He is recorded in the 1606 household register of Emperor Rudolf II as a ‘sculptor and picture engraver’ with a monthly salary of 20 gulden. It is difficult to follow his working career, which began a few years earlier, because, unlike his father, he did not sign his medals. In the inventory of Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer, drawn up between 1607 and 1611, Alessandro Abondio is noted as the maker of a large number of embossed wax pieces, mainly of mythological subjects. After the death of Rudolf II, Abondio entered the service of Emperor Matthias II (reg 1612–19) and then worked for his successor, Emperor Ferdinand II. In 1619 Abondio married Regina von Aachen, the widow of the painter Hans von Aachen. In that same year he obtained Munich citizenship and from then on was largely resident there. At first Abondio worked for Duke Albrecht VI (d 1666); the surviving records attest to a long personal relationship between the artist and his ducal patron. Alessandro made wax portraits of the Duke, which were used by an Augsburg die-cutter as models for the dies for Gnadenpfennige (‘charity pennies’); precious versions of these were produced by the Munich goldsmiths Christoph Ulrich Eberl (before 1580–1634) and Hans Osinger.
Part of the Abondio family
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