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.
Read more about this topic: Frans Floris
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
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—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 16:26.
“I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)