Rogier van der Weyden

In March 1436 the city council of Brussels named Rogier van der Weyden its official painter, a post so prestigious under the ruling dukes of Burgundy that the council later decreed no one should ever hold it again after him. It was an unusual honor. Painters in this period normally worked as anonymous guild craftsmen, but Rogier's reputation had already outgrown that arrangement.

That reputation rested on paintings like The Descent from the Cross, made around 1435 for the archers' guild of Louvain, a Flemish city south of Brussels. Rogier compressed the ten mourning figures around Christ's body into a shallow gilded box that reads almost like a carved altarpiece, dense and immediate. The painting impressed Mary of Hungary, the regent who governed the Netherlands for her brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and she took it into her own collection, from which it eventually passed to the King of Spain.

Copies and versions of his compositions, produced in his own busy workshop and in the workshops of others who simply borrowed his figures, still turn up across Europe, evidence of how fast courts and churches wanted paintings made in his manner. Little else survives of Rogier's own words, no signed letters, no diary, almost no contract in his own hand — only the paintings and the council's pointed refusal to name a second official painter of Brussels after him.