Mander, Karel Van

Mander, Karel van (kä`rəl vän män`dər), 1548–1606, Flemish painter and humanist. He wrote plays on biblical themes and translated from the classics. He is known primarily for his biography of painters, Het Schilder-Boeck (1604; tr. Dutch and Flemish Painters, 1936), which, despite its inaccuracies, is generally an adequate early source on Northern painters.

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Mander, Karel van

(born May 1548, Meulebeke, Flanders, Spanish Netherlands—died Sept. 2, 1606, Amsterdam, Neth.) Dutch painter, poet, and writer. Born of a noble family, after much wandering he settled in Haarlem in 1583 and founded a successful academy of painting with Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz (1562–1638). He is best known for The Book of Painters (1604), which contains about 175 biographies of Dutch, Flemish, and German painters of the 15th–16th centuries; it became for the northern countries what Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters had been for Italy.

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Mander, Karel Van 

(also Carel van Mander). Born in 1548 in Meulebeke, Flanders; died Sept. 2, 1606, in Amsterdam. Dutch painter, poet, art historian, and art theorist.

Between 1569 and 1573, van Mander wrote religious dramas. He lived in Rome from 1573 to 1577. Upon his return to the Low Countries in 1583, he founded in Haarlem the first Dutch academy of arts with H. Goltzius and Cornelisz van Haarlem. Van Mander wrote The Painter’s Book, whose most interesting section was a collection of biographies of Dutch and German artists that was modeled on Vasari’s Lives. The book is an extremely important source for the study of 15th- and 16th-century Northern European art. Van Mander’s work as a theorist and painter (mythological and genre compositions) showed a tendency toward mannerism.

WORKS

Het schilderboeck. Haarlem, 1604.
Het schilderboeck. [Utrecht, 1969.]
In Russian translation:
Kniga o khudozhnikakh. Moscow-Leningrad, 1940.

REFERENCE

Noë, H. Carel van Mander en Italië. The Hague, 1954.