Jan van Scorel

In 1522 the cardinals did something they would not repeat for 450 years and chose a pope from the Low Countries, Adrian VI, a plain-living theologian from Utrecht. A young painter from the same region, Jan van Scorel, happened to be in Rome, and the new pope handed him a remarkable post, keeper of the Vatican's antiquities and its sculpture collection in the Belvedere. For a northerner it was a rare pass into the heart of the Italian Renaissance.

Scorel had taken the long way there. Before Rome he had sailed to the Holy Land and sketched Jerusalem, filling a notebook he would draw on for the rest of his life. In Rome he studied the ancient statues in his charge and the recent work of Raphael and Michelangelo, and when the pope died after barely a year, Scorel went home.

Back in Utrecht he became a canon of the church of Saint John and ran a busy workshop, training pupils including the young Maarten van Heemskerck. He is remembered as the man who carried the Italian manner north, grafting Roman muscle and perspective onto Netherlandish painting. His group portraits of returned Jerusalem pilgrims, each a sober individual face lined up in a row, are among the earliest of their kind in Dutch art.