Wenceslas Cobergher (1560 – 23 November 1634), sometimes called Wenzel Coebergher, was a Flemish Renaissance architect, engineer, painter, antiquarian, numismatist and economist.

Faded somewhat into the background as a painter, he is chiefly remembered today as the man responsible for the draining of the Moëres on the Franco-Belgian border.

Following the example of his master, Cobergher left for Italy in 1579, trying to fulfil the dream of every artist to study Italian art and culture.

He must also have built up a reputation as an art connoisseur, since in 1598 he was asked to make an inventory and set a value on the paintings of the deceased cardinal Bonelli.

[1] Sometimes the "Tractatus de pictura antiqua" (published in Mantua, 1591) has been ascribed to Cobergher, but this was based on an erroneous reading of an 18th-century catalogue.

During his stay in Italy he painted, under the name "maestro Vincenzo", a number of altarpieces and other works for important churches in Naples and Rome.

One of his best known paintings is the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, originally in the Cathedral of Our Lady (Antwerp), but now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy.

His Angels Supporting the Dead Lord, originally in the Sint-Antoniuskerk in Antwerp, can now also be found in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, while his Ecce Homo is now in the museum of Toulouse.

Cobergher began his career as an architect in Italy, designing fountains and canals (not confirmed by surviving documents).

His renown as an architect even reached the court of the Archduke Albert and Infanta Isabella, governors of the Southern Netherlands.

In 1605 he painted two altarpieces, a Deposition (Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium) and St. Helena with the Holy Cross (Saint James' Church, Antwerp).

In 1610 he designed, together with the French engineer Salomon de Caus, fountains for the ponds near the archducal palace in Brussels, using the Italian tempietto style.

In 1607, Cobergher was ordered to redo a bastion of the Catholic Counter Reformation: the whole city of Scherpenheuvel, in Brabant, was to be redesigned as an allegoric homage to the Mother of God, with a layout based on a 7-pointed star.

His later works evolved into his own style, more in harmony with the traditional Northern Renaissance in Flanders, but with additions of early Baroque elements.

As an economist, he was responsible for introducing this concept of public pawnshops to Flanders, after seeing the Monti di Pietà in Italy.

Some of them he designed himself in his mixed style of traditional schemes with Baroque features : Ghent (1622), Tournai (1622, now the Musée d’histoire et d'archéologie), Arras (1624), Lille (1628) and Bergues-Saint-Winock (1633).

He planned several drainage works in the western and southern parts of the Campine (Dutch: Kempen), a region which then consisted mainly of moor or swamp, heath and sandy peat.

In 1612, inspired by his observations of the Pontine Marshes southeast of Rome, he composed a report on the draining of Les Moëres (in Dutch : de Moeren), a marshy region of about 3500 ha.