Michiel Coxcie (1499-1592) and the Giants of His Age

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"Michiel Coxcie lived to the age of 93 and witnessed all the important political, religious, economic and artistic upheavals of the sixteenth century. He was born just before Gerard David raised the art of the Flemish Primitives to its final pinnacle and did not die until the young Rubens had returned to Antwerp from Cologne. He must have known Quinten Metsijs, Joos van Cleve and Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Willem Key and Frans Floris were younger contemporaries, and Bruegel was of the next generation. He outlived them all. During his time in Italy in the 1530s he knew Michelangelo, and was said to be a friend of Giorgio Vasari. Titian, the Venetian prodigy, sent him pigments to help him finish his copy of Jan van Eycks Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, and he even painted frescoes in the old Basilica of St Peter in Rome. Few people have led such a fascinating life as Michiel Coxcie. He was a celebrated painter, inundated with prestigious commissions from important clients. He had spent some ten years in Rome where he studied classical antiquity and the art of Renaissance masters like Raphael, Michelangelo and Da Vinci. Back in his the low Countries, Coxcie designed altarpieces, stained-glass windows and tapestries for clients in Brussels, Antwerp and Mechelen. The pinnacle of his career was his appointment as court painter to Emperor Charles V and Philip I. This book focuses on the multifaceted oeuvre of a highly talented yet all but forgotten master who, by introducing the art of the Italian High Renaissance into the Netherlands, earned himself the epithet of the 'Flemish Raphael'."--Front inside flap of dust jacket.

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