Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder
He is known for his creation of a print depicting a map of his native town Bruges and the illustrations for a Dutch-language publication recounting stories from Aesop's Fables.
His attention to naturalistic detail and his practice of drawing animals from life for his prints had an important influence on European book illustration.
[4] Not long after her husband's death, Marcus' mother remarried Simon Pieters, who was also a painter and probably a native of the Northern Netherlands.
Art historians believe that he started his training with Simon Pieters and later worked in the workshop of his guardian Albert Cornelis.
On 10 September 1559, he was commissioned to provide designs for the tombs of Mary of Burgundy and Charles the Bold in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges.
He drew the patterns for the lavishly decorated metal ornaments, the colorful coats of arms and two copper angels that were attached to the sides of the tombs.
In 1561 Marcus Gheeraerts was commissioned to complete a triptych of the Passion of Christ that had been commenced by the prominent painter Bernard van Orley.
Originally intended for the church of the monastery of Brou near Bourg-en-Bresse (Ain department, France), which Margaret of Austria had built, the triptych was transferred to Bruges after her death.
[4] It is during this period that Gheeraerts most likely painted the Triumphant Christ (collection of the Memling museum in Old St. John's Hospital in Bruges).
Whereas Calvinism was initially tolerated, the religious persecution of Calvinists commenced in 1567 with the arrival of new governor of the Low Countries, the Duke of Alva.
In 1566 or shortly after, he created a print referred to as the Allegory of Iconoclasm that shows a composite rotting head of a monk.
In the foreground Protestant iconoclasts are smashing altarpieces, religious sculptures, other church-related items and hurling them into a fire.
[4] Fearing that he would be condemned to death in the criminal proceedings against him, Gheeraerts fled in 1568 to England with his son Marcus and his workshop assistant Philipus de la Valla.
His wife was a sister of Queen Elizabeth I's serjeant-painter, John de Critz, another Flemish painter who had fled to England.
The only child surviving into adulthood, Sarah, later married the famous French-born English limner Isaac Oliver.
In 1577 a 'Mercus Geeraert Painter' was registered as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke of Antwerp and paid registration fees for the years 1585 and 1586.
His workshop assistant Philipus de la Valla who fled with him to England may also have been a pupil of Gheeraerts although he is sometimes referred to in contemporary records as a servant.
It is documented that he finished the triptych of the Passion of Christ that had been commenced by the prominent painter Bernard van Orley.
It has been suggested that Bernard van Orley started the centre of the panel and that Marcus Gheeraerts completed the outer areas.
[11] The panel of the Triumphant Christ (Memling museum in Old St. John's Hospital in Bruges) has been attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts.
In both paintings, a procession is moving from right to left headed by two men carrying large oval cakes, two violinists and a man bearing a vase with rosemary tied with ribbons.
The paintings may have been intended to showcase the dignity and piety of the Flemish émigré community in England and to assert their proper place in their adopted country.
[13] Karel van Mander wrote in his Schilderboeck from 1604 that Gheeraerts was a good landscape painter, who "often had the habit of including a squatting, urinating woman on a bridge or elsewhere.
[4] The description of the art collection of Cornelis van Hooghendorp made at the end of the 16th century included five paintings by Gheeraerts.
Marcus Gheeraerts etched the title page and the 107 illustrations for each fable that his friend, Edewaerd de Dene, had written in his local Flemish verse.
Gheeraerts initiated and financed the publication, which was printed to the highest standards of its time as a luxurious object with three different fonts.
The principal source of the text in the book were Les fables du très ancien Ésope written by the French humanist Gilles Corrozet and published in Paris in 1542.
A second source was the Aesopi Phrygis et aliorum fabulae, a collection of fables in Latin that was published on the Antwerp printing presses of Christophe Plantin in various editions from 1660.
[17] A Latin version, Mythologia ethica, was published in the following year with a title page likely based on a drawing by Gheeraerts.
