Legging van de eerste steen van de Jezuietenkerk te Brussel door Albrecht en Isabella van Oostenrijk, penning gelegd onder fundamenten van nieuwbouw 1600

This is a commemorative coin, likely made in 1606. It marks the laying of the foundation stone for the Jesuit Church in Brussels by Albrecht and Isabella of Austria. Coins like this were often buried within the foundations of important buildings and served as time capsules, linking specific historical moments with future generations. On one side, the coin depicts an image of the church itself, while the inscription on the reverse is in Latin. The coin encapsulates power dynamics of the time; it symbolizes the intertwining of religious authority, aristocratic patronage, and political power during the Counter-Reformation. Coins are not just documents, they are physical testaments to the ambitions and ideologies of the people who created them. They remind us how power is symbolically constructed and literally embedded within the spaces we inhabit.