Painter of the Bible
Frans Floris I
Frans Floris (Frans de Vriendt, called Floris) was the leading Antwerp painter of the middle of the sixteenth century and the principal Antwerp Romanist of his generation — the painter who, after a long Italian sojourn, …
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Life & work
Frans Floris (Frans de Vriendt, called Floris) was the leading Antwerp painter of the middle of the sixteenth century and the principal Antwerp Romanist of his generation — the painter who, after a long Italian sojourn, brought the Roman Mannerist figural vocabulary descending from Michelangelo and Raphael into the Antwerp painting tradition. Born in Antwerp in 1517 (or perhaps slightly earlier) to a stonemason family (his brothers Cornelis and Jacob Floris were also working artists), trained in Liège in the workshop of Lambert Lombard before traveling to Italy around 1541 (where he spent four years studying the Roman Mannerist altarpieces and the recent Sistine Chapel Last Judgment of Michelangelo), and active in Antwerp on his return until his death there in 1570.
His Christian religious work is concentrated in altarpieces produced for the Antwerp Catholic churches and confraternities of the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s — the productive Antwerp decades immediately before the iconoclastic destruction of 1566 swept away most of the surviving Catholic religious imagery in the Low Countries. The Fall of the Rebel Angels (Antwerp Cathedral, 1554 — a large altarpiece commissioned by the Antwerp Confraternity of Fencers and depicting the cosmic battle in heaven with the rebellious angels tumbling from grace into hell, with characteristic Roman Mannerist muscular figural drawing and dramatic foreshortening), the Last Judgment altarpiece (Brussels, 1565), the Resurrection of Christ (Antwerp), and the Adoration of the Shepherds (multiple workshop variants) anchor the painted corpus.
His personal style — the Roman Mannerist muscular nude figural drawing absorbed from Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling and the late Roman commissions, combined with the post-Italian Antwerp colorist tradition descending from Quentin Matsys — defined the mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp Mannerist painting school and shaped the next generation of Antwerp painters who would absorb his Romanist vocabulary at one further remove. His pupil Maerten de Vos in particular carried the Floris workshop tradition into the second half of the sixteenth century.
He ran the largest and most prolific Antwerp workshop of his generation; his workshop is recorded as having had as many as 120 apprentices and assistants across his career, an unusually large operation by the Antwerp standards of the time. The 1566 iconoclastic destruction wrecked many of his altarpieces and the commercial collapse that followed substantially reduced his late-career output.
Notable works in detail
Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple
Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, drawn by Frans Floris around 1530 (the dating is somewhat early — Floris would have been a teenager) in pen and brown ink with wash on paper and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, illustrates the scene from John 2 (and parallel passages in the Synoptics) in which Christ overturns the tables of the money-changers and dove-sellers in the outer court of the Temple. The drawing shows Christ at the center of the composition with his arm raised in the act of driving out the merchants; the money-changers in postures of flight and resistance; the Temple architecture rising behind. The drawing demonstrates the early Floris draughtsmanship and the rapid confident pen-and-wash technique that the Antwerp Mannerist tradition would later refine in the post-Italian decades after Floris's transformative Italian sojourn of 1541–1545.
Bible scenes Frans Floris I painted
Matthew
