Hendrick van Cleve III

Around 1550 a young Antwerp painter came home from Italy with a portfolio full of Rome, its broken aqueducts, half-buried temples and the Vatican still under construction. Hendrick van Cleve III had trained under his father Willem and then under Frans Floris, the leading history painter in the city, and what he brought back was a specialty in landscape. In a workshop town where figures paid better, he became the man others called on to fill in the world behind their saints and gods. His brother Marten, a painter of peasant scenes, and Floris himself handed him their backgrounds to complete.

In 1587 an Antwerp publisher issued 38 of his drawings as a set of engravings, a printed tour of Roman ruins that carried his name across Europe.

Then came the strange afterlife of that name. For generations a whole crowd of paintings of the Tower of Babel, that spiral of scaffolding climbing into the clouds, hung under his signature. Scholars have since pulled most of them away and given them instead to a set of anonymous Flemish hands so close to his manner that they are known only as the Hendrick van Cleve III Group.