Frans Floris
1519–1570 · Habsburg Netherlands · Northern Renaissance
The story
Around 1541 a young painter from Antwerp, Frans Floris, made the journey south to Rome. He studied the ancient sculpture and the work of Michelangelo and Raphael, and he came home changed. Floris was one of the Romanists, Netherlandish artists who brought the muscular figures and classical subjects of the Italian Renaissance back north.
In Antwerp he set up a workshop on the Italian model, large and organized, turning out mythologies and altarpieces with the help of many assistants. He kept a notebook of drawings his pupils could copy and etch, and dozens of painters passed through his studio.
His best-known picture is The Fall of the Rebel Angels, finished in 1554 for the Antwerp guild of fencers, a tangle of falling, twisting nude bodies that shows how thoroughly he had studied Michelangelo. It hangs today in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp.
