Joos van Cleve
Some of the paintings now attributed to Joos van Cleve were, at that time, known as the works of the "Master of the Death of the Virgin", after the triptych in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne.
It is assumed that he began his artistic training around 1505 in the workshop of Jan Joest, whom he assisted in the panel paintings of the wings for the high altar of the Nikolaikirche in Kalkar, Lower Rhine, Germany,[11] from 1506 to 1509.
Although the date of his death is unknown, Joos van Cleve drew up a will and testament on 10 November 1540, and his second wife was listed as a widow in April 1541.
[15] Numerous paintings contain heraldry, which often enables the customers to be identified, including eleven of the twenty-one altarpieces attributed to the workshop.
[16] The great majority of his work is religious subjects or portraits, with the main exceptions being versions of the Suicide of Lucretia, and a Leonardo-esque half-length nude, the Mona Vanna in the National Gallery in Prague.
A strong influence of Italian art combined with Joos van Cleve's own color and light sensitivity make his works especially unique.
Like Quentin Matsys, a fellow artist active in Antwerp, Joos van Cleve appropriated themes and techniques of Leonardo da Vinci.
[7] Joos van Cleve's skills as a portrait artist were highly regarded as demonstrated by a summons to the court of Francis I of France.
Some historians have interpreted this as evidence that the portraits were pendants painted to commemorate the meeting of the two kings in Calais and Boulogne on 21 and 29 October 1532, which Joos might possibly have witnessed.
Other historians have proposed the alternative view that van Cleve based the Henry VIII portrait on that of Francis I without meeting the English king.
This essentially reduced the figures from Jan van Eyck's Lucca Madonna (c. 1435, Städel, Frankfurt) to a close-up with domestic still life details, and added Saint Joseph over the Virgin's shoulder.
[21][22] Another of the many compositional types exists in very similar versions, one in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest and another sold at Sotheby's on 30 January 2014.
The composition shows the Virgin with a brilliant red cloak, lined with fur and elaborately embroidered with pearls along the outside edge.
Characteristic of Netherlandish painting of this period are the jewel-like colours and the details of the Virgin's costume and brocade pillow in the foreground.
[24] Paintings of Saint Jerome were produced by Joos and his workshop, apparently beginning in 1521, in three basic types: penitent amid a desert landscape, with his attribute of a lion; at bust or half-length in a cluttered study, often with a skull on his desk; and lastly in his study, naked to the waist and holding a rock.
The first two are not original, and borrow in particular from Albrecht Dürer; the last, from the 1520s onwards, is an unusual combination of a figure type usually seen outdoors with the indoors study setting.
