Prediking van Johannes de Doper

May 1548

Born

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.

1573–1577

Roman years: grotesques, landscapes and “caves”

In Rome, where he stays for more than three years, van Mander works as a painter and becomes acquainted with patronage: several cardinals commission frescoes with landscapes from him, and he becomes proficient in the painting of grotesques. His biographical sketch calls him the discoverer of “caves” in Rome — perhaps the catacombs, though the exact meaning of the reference is unclear.

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.