Michiel Coxcie (1499-1592) and the Giants of His Age

Michiel Coxcie lived to the age of 93 and witnessed all the important political, religious, economic and artistic upheavals of the sixteenth century. He was born just before Gerard David raised the art of the Flemish Primitives to its final pinnacle and did not die until the young Rubens had returned to Antwerp from Cologne. He must have known Quinten Metsijs, Joos van Cleve and Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Willem Key and Frans Floris were younger contemporaries, and Bruegel was of the next generation. He outlived them all. During his time in Italy in the 1530s he knew Michelangelo, and was said to be a friend of Giorgio Vasari. Titian, the Venetian prodigy, sent him pigments to help him finish his copy of Jan van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, and he even painted frescoes in the old Basilica of St Peter in Rome. Few people have led such a fascinating life as Michiel Coxcie. He was a celebrated painter, inundated with prestigious commissions from important clients. He had spent some ten years in Rome where he studied classical antiquity and the art of Renaissance masters like Raphael, Michelangelo and Da Vinci. Back in his the low Countries, Coxcie designed altarpieces, stained-glass windows and tapestries for clients in Brussels, Antwerp and Mechelen. The pinnacle of his career was his appointment as court painter to Emperor Charles V and Philip I. This book explores the multifaceted oeuvre of this talented master.

Peter Carpreau, 'Vanished like smoke along with fleeting time': The Lost Reputation of Michiel Coxcie, Koenraad Jonckheere and Ruben Suykerbuyk, The Life and Times of Michiel Coxcie 1499-1592, Eckhard Leuschner, The Young Talent in Italy, Koenraad Jonckheere, Michiel Coxcie and the Reception of Classical Antiquity in the Low Countries, Almudena Pérez de Tudela, Michiel Coxcie, Court Painter, Koenraad Jonckheere, First Painter of the Counter-Reformation, Melina Reijntjens, The Habsburg Windows in Brussels Cathedral, Joris Van Grieken, Publish or Perish: Michiel Coxcie in Print