Frans Floris

The Romanists had typically travelled to Italy to study the works of leading Italian High Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael and their followers.

Most of what we know about the youth and training of Frans Floris is based on the early biographer Karel van Mander's biography of the artist.

According to van Mander, Frans Floris was the son of the stonecutter Cornelis I de Vriendt (died 1538).

Local nobility including the knights of the Golden Fleece, the Prince of Orange and the Counts of Egmont and Horn (later the leaders of the Dutch Revolt) visited Floris at his home, attracted by his artistic reputation as well as his ability to talk with ‘great insight and judgment on any topic’.

[6] He also moved in the circle of the leading humanists such as Abraham Ortelius, Christophe Plantin, Lucas de Heere, Lambert Lombard, Dominicus Lampsonius and Hieronymus Cock.

[4] His brother Cornelis designed a palace for him in Antwerp with a façade of blue limestone and with luxurious decorations such as gilded leather wall-coverings in the bedroom.

Above the doorway of the house a relief depicted the sciences (the seven liberal arts together with painting and architectures) as the principal components of human society.

Van Mander recounts that Floris nearly always had a large commission in his workshop on which he would work late at night, and that when he dozed off his pupils would take off his shoes and stockings and put him to bed before they left.

Van Mander cites Frans Menton who asserted Floris was loved by his pupils for allowing them more freedom than other Antwerp masters.

[8] The debts were likely related to his high costs of living as well as the impact of the Beeldenstorm or Iconoclastic Fury that commenced from the 1560s and reached its peak in 1566.

He virtually stopped painting after 1566 and his place as the leading history painter in the Habsburg Netherlands was taken by a younger generation of artists among whom Marten de Vos became the most prominent.

[12] Van Mander recounts that while working on a large commission for the grand prior of Spain, Floris became ill and died on 1 October 1570 in Antwerp.

His paintings for the grand prior were finished by his studio assistants Frans Pourbus the Elder and Chrispijn van den Broeck.

Poems were written about him by Dominicus Lampsonius and the poet-painter Lucas de Heere, who according to van Mander, was his pupil.

[8] The long list of pupils and assistants shows that Frans Floris had upon his return to Antwerp adopted the studio practices that he had witnessed in Italy.

[4] Comparatively few of his works have survived, possibly because many were destroyed during the iconoclastic destructions in Antwerp in the second half of the sixteenth century.

He was one of the first Netherlandish artists to travel to Italy and study the latest developments in art as well as the Classical relics of Rome.

The principal contemporary influences were Michelangelo from whom he borrowed the heroic treatment of the nude and Raphael whom he emulated by developing a ‘relief-like’ idiom.

Floris did, however, not abandon the traditional Netherlandish technique of oil paint, which allowed him to fuse its detailed, descriptive properties with his radically new visual language, in which embellishments were reduced to a minimum and the nude played a prominent role.

Floris pioneered two types of images in the late 1540s: expressive portraits of individual sitters and head studies on panels.

By 1562, Floris’ distinctive head studies had become a form of authorial performance, which bore witness to his creative genius and the workshop practices that he had imported from Italy.

The rapid, expressive brushwork of these panels suggests that he painted some heads as creative studies and thus anticipate in a certain way the tronies of 17th-century artists.

He included self-portraits in some of his religious works such as the composition Rijckart Aertsz as Saint Luke in which he included himself as the pigment grinder and in the composition Allegory of the Trinity (Louvre) where beneath Christ's outstretched right arm he painted his self-portrait, which appears out of scale with the other heads around him.