5. Karel van Mander, Painter Book, 1604.

The Flemish born Dutch Mannerist painter, Karel van Mander’s early seventeenth century artist biographies or Schilder Book (Book on Painting) was the first comprehensive attempt to draw on the precedent for artists lives set by Giorgio Vasari. One section directly borrows roughly half of the biographies of Vasari. In the largest section of the book, Van Mander covered the “Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters.”

Van Mander aimed to position Northern art alongside the Tuscan and Italian schools of painting. The book begins with a poem on the ‘form, nature and essence’ of painting. The second part that includes Vasari’s Lives, covers art from its origins and draws heavily upon Pliny’s account for the history of the arts in antiquity. The final biographical section on artists from the Netherlands and Germany was translated into English in the 1990s by the leading Van Mander scholar, Hessel Miedama. The lives end with a strong focus upon the artistic cultural centre van Mander was a part of, in the city of Harlem.

In the seventeenth century, it was an additional account of artistic iconology and a commentary on the classical mythology of Ovid’s Book, the Metamorphosis, which made van Mader’s work famous as an inspiration for both artists and their patrons.