Karel Van Mander - Legacy

Legacy

He was the master of Frans Hals, and it was through him that Hals received his art restoration commission from the Haarlem city council. However, Hals certainly disregarded van Mander's conventional belief that history painting was the highest of the hierarchy of genres. His book brought a glimpse of Italy to the North-Netherlandish artists, and influenced them to travel, if not follow the book's instructions on Italian painting methods. The school that van Mander founded based on this work, continued in Haarlem after him for centuries. Aside from his son Karel van Mander the Younger and Frans Hals, his registered pupils were Cornelis Engelsz, Everard Crynsz van der Maes, Jacobus Martens (landscape painter and father of the painter Jan Martszen de Jonge), Jacob Martsen (genre painter), Jacob van Musscher, Hendrik Gerritsz Pot, and François Venant.

Van Mander was famously influential on the art writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Amongst others, Cornelis de Bie (Gulden Cabinet, 1662), Joachim von Sandrart (Teutsche Akademie, 1675), Filippo Baldinucci (Notizie de' Professori, 1681), and Arnold Houbraken (Schouburg, 1720) used material from his Schilderboeck for their biographical sketches of Netherlandish painters. His book is still the most-cited primary source in biographical accounts of the lives of many artists from his lists, but of most interest to historians is his criticism of their work, especially when he describes the location and owner of the paintings, thus becoming a valuable source for art provenance. The Schilder-boeck is part of the Basic Library of the dbnl (Canon of Dutch Literature) which contains the 1000 most important works in Dutch literature from the Middle Ages to today.