Sitzende Frau

1573

Sets out for Italy

In 1573 van Mander travels to Italy in the company of some young nobles. Other accounts say that in Florence he worked with Giorgio Vasari on the fresco of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore.

1583

Flees by ship to Haarlem

Threatened by religious troubles and the plague, van Mander flees by ship with his family and his mother-in-law to the Dutch Republic and settles in Haarlem, where he will live for the next twenty years.

1585

Spranger's drawings for Goltzius

Van Mander shows his friend Hendrick Goltzius drawings by Bartholomeus Spranger, then the leading artist of Northern Mannerism and court artist of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. The drawings have a galvanising effect on Goltzius; his engravings after them spread the Mannerist style, and van Mander, Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem become known as the “Haarlem Mannerists” — with a strong awareness of style, cultivated elegance, artful ingenuity rather than naturalism, exaggeratedly brawny figures, violent drama and a heightened richness of detail.

1587

Founding of the Haarlem academy

Together with Cornelis van Haarlem and Hendrick Goltzius van Mander founds an “academy to study after life”, later known as the Haarlem Academy of Mannerists. What it actually did is not entirely clear: by one account, modelled on the Italian pattern, it studied anatomy and drew from nude models, including women, which was forbidden in the North at the time; by another, it was an informal discussion group, and by a third it was literary in nature.

1604

The “Schilder-Boeck” is published

In Haarlem, from the press of Passchier van Wesbusch, appears the “Schilder-Boeck” (“Book of Painters”) — the first art-historical work in Northern Europe: lives of more than 250 painters, ancient and contemporary, together with the art theory of the day for aspiring painters. Inspired by Vasari's “Lives”, it comprises six parts, from a verse address to students and biographies of ancient, Italian, Netherlandish and German masters to a commentary on Ovid's “Metamorphoses” and a guide to depicting figures; its biographical details on early Netherlandish painters, and above all the Haarlem painters, are unique, gathered by van Mander himself.

11. September 1606

Died