Michiel Coxie
1592 · Habsburg Netherlands · Northern Renaissance
The story
In the late 1550s King Philip II of Spain wanted the Ghent Altarpiece, the great multi-panel work the Van Eyck brothers had finished in 1432, and he could not simply take the original. So he sent for Michiel Coxcie and asked him to paint the whole thing again. Coxcie's version is the oldest complete copy of the polyptych, and it let the king carry a Ghent Altarpiece of his own back to Madrid.
Coxcie earned that commission over a long career. Spanish contemporaries called him the Flemish Raphael, after a decade he spent in Italy studying Raphael, Michelangelo and the antique, which pulled his Flemish training toward Roman grandeur. He became court painter to Emperor Charles V and then to Philip, working in altarpieces, portraits, tapestry and stained-glass designs.
He kept painting into old age. By tradition Coxcie died in 1592, in his early nineties, after a fall from scaffolding while at work on a picture.
