Pieter Coecke van Aelst

Pieter Coecke van Aelst was born in Aalst, where his father war Deputy Mayor. The early Flemish biographer Karel van Mander wrote in his Schilder-boeck published in 1604 that Coecke van Aelst studied under Bernard van Orley, a leading Renaissance painter based in Brussels. There are no documents that prove this apprenticeship but there are strong stylistic similarities between the styles of the two artists. According to Karel van Mander, Pieter Coecke van Aelst later studied in Italy where in Rome he made drawings after Classical sculpture and architecture. Although there is no firm evidence that Coecke van Aelst travelled to Italy, stylistic evidence supports the notion that he travelled to Italy. The Italian influence could, however, also be attributed to the fact that Raphael’s tapestry cartoons were available in Brussels, where they were used for the manufacture of tapestries around 1516. However, as Coecke van Aelst clearly was familiar with Raphael's fresco of the Triumph of Galatea located in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, it seems likely he did in fact travel to Italy. Pieter Coecke van Aelst married twice. He married his first wife Anna van Dornicke in 1525 shortly after his move to Antwerp. Anna was the daughter of Jan Mertens van Dornicke, one of the most successful painters working in Antwerp. His father in law was possibly his teacher. Coecke van Aelst took over his father-in-law's workshop after the latter's death in 1527. There were two children from this first marriage, Michiel and Pieter II. The latter was a painter. After the death of his first wife before 1529, Coecke van Aelst had an affair with Anthonette van der Sandt (also known as Antonia van der Sant). The pair never married but had a daughter, Antonette, and at least one son, Pauwel who also became a painter. Coecke van Aelst is recorded joining the local Guild of Saint Luke of Antwerp in 1527. In 1533, he travelled to Constantinople where he stayed for one year during which he tried to convince the Turkish sultan to give him commissions for tapestries. This mission failed to generate any commissions from the sultan. Coecke made many drawings during his stay in Turkey including of the buildings, people and the indigenous flora. He seems to have retained from this trip an abiding interest in the accurate rendering of nature that gave his tapestries an added dimension. The drawings which Coecke van Aelst made during his stay in Turkey were posthumously published by his widow under the title (Antwerp, 1553). Upon his return to Antwerp in 1534, Coecke van Aelst produced designs for a large-scale figure, called 'Druon Antigoon' or the 'Giant of Antwerp' of which the head in papier-maché possibly still survives (Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp). In the year 1537 Coecke van Aelst was elected a dean of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke. He also received a stipend from the Antwerp city government. There is speculation that Coecke set up a second workshop in Brussels but there is no evidence for this. ==Work==

General Pieter Coecke van Aelst was a versatile artist and a master designer who devised projects across a wide range of different media, including panel paintings, sculptures, prints, tapestries, stained glass and goldsmith's work. No signed and few reliably documented paintings by Coecke van Aelst have survived. In his art Coecke showed his ambition to emulate contemporary Italian artists. From the later 1520s his works start to reveal the Italian influence, as is noticeable in his figures, which gain in monumentality, and the greater movement and drama in his compositions. His main model was Raphael and his circle. Coecke was likely already familiar with their compositions in Antwerp. However, when he traveled to Constantinople around 1533, he likely visited Mantua, where Raphael's leading pupil Giulio Romano was active at the time. Romano possessed a large collection of Raphael's drawings and Coecke must have availed himself of the opportunity to study these in detail during his visit. After his return to Flanders Coecke's style changed dramatically and approached the Italian models he had studied. The style that he created was widely imitated. The composition was popularised through a print after it made by Hendrik Goltzius. Saint Jerome is revered by Christians for his translation into Latin of the Bible, which he produced while residing in a monastery in Palestine. One of the principal influences on the Flemish iconography of St. Jerome was Albrecht Dürer's St. Jerome in His Study completed in March 1521. In the version of the subject in the Walters Museum Coecke van Aelst suggests the Oriental setting by the view visible through the window which shows a landscape with camels. To the wall is affixed an admonition, "Cogita Mori" (Think upon death), a vanitas motif that is reiterated by the skull. Further reminders of the motifs of the passage of time and the imminence of death are the image of the Last Judgment visible in the saint's Bible, the candle and the hourglass. Another version of this subject was sold at Christie's (28 January 2015, New York, lot 104). This version reprises iconographic elements, which stress Christian beliefs regarding the transience of human life and the importance of the sacrifice of Christ for people to find salvation at the time of the so-called Last Judgement. The work also clearly is close to Albrecht Dürer's St. Jerome in His Study of 1521. These designs were typically small-scale drawings in black-and-white. His cartoon for the Martyrdom of St. Peter (Brussels Town Hall) is in grisaille with touches of green and red while the names of the other colors, such as gold or blue, are written in. The patrons for the tapestries included Emperor Charles V, Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England and Cosimo de' Medici. Vermeyen had reportedly accompanied Charles V on the military expedition to Tunis and had made sketches of the people, events and landscapes that he observed during the campaign. The Conquest of Tunis tapestries were extensively used for propagandistic purposes by the Habsburg dynasty. They were displayed at all court festivities, state events and religious ceremonies and had pride of place in the principal reception rooms of the Brussels palace and later in the Alcázar palace. The Poesia series was inspired by the stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Only one set of the tapestries was ever woven after they were designed around 1547–1548. King Philip II of Spain acquired the set in 1556. The Story of the Creation was designed around 1548 and acquired by Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and his spouse Eleanor of Toledo. He was also the publisher and designer of a volume of prints entitled De seer wonderlijke...Triumphelijke Incompst van ... Prince Philips commemorating the Joyous entry into Antwerp of Prince Philip (the future Philip II) in 1549. Coecke had himself designed some of the triumphal arches and stages that were reproduced in the volume. He, and after his death, his widow Mayken Verhulst, published the five books of Sebastiano Serlio's architectural treatise Architettura in Flemish, French and High German (the German translation was done by another translator). The first translation published was the fourth book of the Architettura published under the title in 1539. Coecke van Aelst's translation of Vitruvius was hailed by the humanist Dominicus Lampsonius as the only Dutch-language book to discuss the building styles of other countries. In line with Italian translations of Vitruvius published earlier in the 16th century, Coecke's translation gave prominence to woodcut illustrations of the text and used columns to indicate the difference between three kinds of architectural representation: plan, elevation, and view. This was a clear break with the few treatises on architecture published earlier in the Low Countries which generally did not provide any visual exegesis. The translations of these important Roman and Italian architectural works played a crucial role in spreading Renaissance ideas to the Low Countries and hastening the transition from the late Gothic style prevalent in the area at the time towards a modern "antique-oriented" architecture in Northern Europe. The translations were further instrumental in establishing a theoretical distinction between the acts of planning and executing a building. This led to the development of architecture as a new independent discipline distinguished from the craft of stonemason. In the Low Countries the relation between architecture and perspective also acquired theoretical backing in Coecke van Aelst's translations. Coecke's translations of architectural publications had an important impact on the architect and graphic artist Hans Vredeman de Vries who is said to have assiduously copied their designs. In the interest of 'localisation', Coecke van Aelst's translation made significant changes to Serlio's original designs. For instance in one illustration he inserted 24 Latin block-letter patterns where Serlio had placed woodcuts of shields. ==Selected works==