Jan van Scorel

Jan van Scorel (1 August 1495 – 6 December 1562) was a Dutch painter, who played a leading role in introducing aspects of Italian Renaissance painting into Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting. Van Scorel was one of the early painters of the Romanist style who had spent a number of years in Italy, where he thoroughly absorbed the Italian style of painting. His trip to Italy coincided with the brief reign of the only Dutch pope in history, Adrian VI in 1522-23. The pope made him a court painter and superintendent of his collection of antiquities. His stay in Italy lasted from 1518 to 1524. He also visited Nuremberg, Venice and Jerusalem. Venetian art had an important impact on the development of his style.

He differed from most Romanists in that he was a native of the northern Netherlands and not of Flanders and that he remained most of his life in the northern Netherlands. He settled permanently in Utrecht in 1530 and established a large workshop on the Italian model. The workshop mainly produced altarpieces, many of which were destroyed in the Reformation iconoclasm in the years just after his death. He also held clerical appointments. This did not stop him from having a long-time relationship with a mistress who may have modelled for some of his female figures.

Van Scorel was born in Schoorl, north of Alkmaar and close to Egmond Abbey. It is not known whether he began his studies under the Master of Alkmaar, Pieter Gerritsz in Haarlem, Jacob Cornelisz in Amsterdam, or with Jan Gossaert in Utrecht, but it is certain that the last two were the master painters he would meet later in his life and who would have the greatest effect on his technique. Van Scorel is recorded in Haarlem in 1517 where he perhaps collaborated with his contemporary Maarten van Heemskerck, who like him, had been born close to Alkmaar (they certainly collaborated in Haarlem in 1528).

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