[Die Auferstehung Christi]

1578–1580

Marries an eighteen-year-old local girl

Settled in Meulebeke, van Mander marries an 18-year-old local girl, with whom he has a son.

1580

Flees to Kortrijk from religious troubles

Because of religious troubles caused by Catholic zealots, van Mander — who had become a Mennonite and was therefore a possible target — leaves Meulebeke; in Kortrijk the family finds refuge with the Grauwe Minnebroeders. There he receives a commission for an altarpiece, and another son is born.

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.

1583–1603

Evenings of drawing and pupils in his home

After the Calvinist iconoclasm religious themes have gone out of fashion and mythology has become popular, but few painters could afford a trip to Italy, so van Mander receives budding artists in his home for evenings of communal drawing and study of classical mythology, to educate them in the proper techniques. A firm believer in the hierarchy of genres, and in the idea that true-to-life historical allegories can be achieved only through proper study of existing works, he counts Frans Hals and Hendrick Gerritsz Pot among his Haarlem pupils.

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.