Karel van Mander

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Karel van Mander
Portrait of Karel van Mander
Born	May 1548 Meulebeke
Died	September 2, 1606
Field	Painting, poetry, writing

Karel van Mander (May 1548–September 2, 1606), Flemish painter, poet and biographer, was born of a noble family at Meulebeke.

He studied under Lucas de Heere at Ghent, and in 1568-1569 under Pieter Vlerick at Kortrijk. The next five years he devoted to the writing of religious plays for which he also painted the scenery. Then followed three years in Rome (1574-1577), where he is said to have been the first to discover the catacombs. On his return journey he passed through Vienna, where, together with the sculptor Hans Mont, he made the triumphal arch for the royal entry of the emperor Rudolph.

The Continence of Scipio by Karel van Mander (1600) Oil on copper, 44 x 79 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

After many vicissitudes caused by war, loss of fortune and plague, he settled at Haarlem where, in conjunction with Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, he founded a successful academy of painting. His fame is, however, principally based upon his Schilderboeck, a voluminous biographical work on the paintings of various epochs—a book that has become for the northern countries what Vasari's Lives of the Painters became for Italy. It was completed in 1603 and published in 1604, in which year Van Mander removed to Amsterdam, where he died in 1606. He was the master of Frans Hals, although his influence on his pupil does not seem strong - Hals certainly disregarded van Mander's conventional belief that history painting was the highest of the hierarchy of genres.

Van Mander was famously influential on the art writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Amongst others, Cornelis de Bie and Arnold Houbraken imitated his Schilderboeck.

[edit] References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. The article is available here: [1]

Miedema, Hessel, The Lives of the illustrious Netherlandish and German painters, from the first edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603-1604), preceded by the lineage, circumstances and place of birth, life and ..., from the second edition of the Schilder-boeck (1616-1618), Soest: Davaco, 1994-1997.