Bartholomeus Spranger

Bartholomeus Spranger built his career by moving toward power. Born in Antwerp in 1546, he trained with minor Netherlandish painters, then spent a decade in Italy working under the miniaturist Giulio Clovio and picking up patrons as grand as a Farnese cardinal and Pope Pius V. From Rome he went north into imperial service, first briefly in Vienna, then to Prague.

Prague was the seat of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, a ruler more taken with art, astronomy and curiosities than with governing, who gathered painters, scholars and instrument-makers around him in a kind of hothouse court. Spranger became his leading painter and gave that court its look: elongated nudes in twisting, elegant poses, gods and goddesses in polished mythological scenes, sensual and highly artificial. This is Northern Mannerism at its most refined, tuned to one emperor's taste.

Because that taste was private and the pictures hung in imperial rooms, they could easily have stayed sealed inside the palace. What carried Spranger's manner across Europe was print. Engravers, above all the Haarlem master Hendrick Goltzius, copied his compositions and sold them as sheets, so that painters who never saw Prague learned to build a figure the Spranger way. He stayed in the city to the end and died there in 1611.