Karel van Mander the Elder

Almost everything we know about the early painters of the Low Countries, we know partly because Karel van Mander wrote it down. In 1604, in Haarlem, he published the Schilder-boeck, the Book of Painters, a fat volume of artists' lives modelled on Giorgio Vasari's famous biographies of the Italians. For dozens of northern painters it is the only near-contemporary account that survives, which makes van Mander the reason many of them have any story at all.

He was a working painter himself, born in Flanders, trained in the Mannerist style, and he had travelled to Italy and seen Rome before settling in the northern Netherlands. Around 1583 he helped set up a kind of academy in Haarlem with the engraver Hendrick Goltzius and the painter Cornelis van Haarlem, where artists drew from the model and from casts, spreading an elegant, elongated Mannerism.

His own paintings, refined and often crowded with twisting figures, are less remembered now than his book. He died in Amsterdam in 1606, and later readers came to lean on the Schilder-boeck so completely that when he passed on a doubtful anecdote or a wrong date, it could travel unquestioned for centuries.