Jan van Dornicke
1470–1527 · Southern Netherlands · Antwerp Mannerism, Northern Renaissance
The story
His name says where he came from. Dornicke is the Flemish form of Doornik, the city the French call Tournai, and a painter called Jan from Tournai registered as a master in the Antwerp painters' guild in 1509 and was dead by about 1527.
That is close to everything the documents give. What attaches a large body of paintings to those few lines is family. His daughter Anna married Pieter Coecke van Aelst, one of the most successful Antwerp painters of the next generation, and Coecke repeated compositions that belong to an anonymous hand known since 1915 as the Master of 1518. In 1966 the Belgian scholar Georges Marlier proposed that the Master and Jan van Dornicke were the same man. Museums print the name today, and many of them add that the identification has never been proved.
