The early Flemish biographer Karel van Mander states in the Schilder-boeck (1604) that de Punder was in Mechelen the pupil of the painter Marcus Willems (1527–1561).
Willems had been a disciple of Michiel Coxie, one of the leading Romanist painters in Flanders who had helped introduce Italian Renaissance painting there.
The altarpiece was commissioned by Nicholas à Spira (1510–1568) who was the abbot of the abbey of the Norbertine Order in Grimbergen in Flanders.
During the anticlerical campaigns of the 1790s following the French Revolution, the altarpiece was apparently dismantled, possibly to separate the portraits from the central panel, which was very likely destroyed.
[6][7] The Fries Museum holds a Portrait of Viglius of Aytta dated 1564 which is attributed to de Punder.