Frans Floris - Works

Works

Van Mander includes a list of leading Antwerp church altars as coming from his workshop, but according to his story, these were then not only by Floris himself, but created from a team of changing pupils under his guidance. Floris painted a series of large pictures for the country houses of Spanish nobles and the villas of Antwerp patricians. He is known to have illustrated the fable of Hercules in ten compositions, and the liberal arts in seven for Nicolaas Jongelinck, a merchant of Antwerp, and adorned the duke of Arschot's palace of Beaumont with fourteen colossal panels.

Comparatively few of his works have descended to us, possibly because many were destroyed in the iconoclastic uprisings in Antwerp of the second half of the sixteenth century, and partly because this era in Flemish painting has fallen out of favor in art circles. The earliest extant canvas by Floris is the Mars and Venus ensnared by Vulcan in the Berlin Museum (1547). There are other works at Aalst, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Dresden, Florence, Zoutleeuw, Madrid, St Petersburg, Châlons-en-Champagne and Vienna.

The boldness and force Floris' works possess reflect the monumental style of their Italian models. Their technical execution reveals a rapid hand, bright coloring, and a mastery of anatomy not always evident in Netherlandish art of the time. Floris owed much of his repute to the cleverness with which his works were transferred to copper by Jerome Cock, Cornelis Cort, and Theodor Galle.