ires, nights, splendours,
devils, and other things of that kind. Pieter Koeck has had much
invention in stories, and has made very beautiful cartoons for
tapestries and arras-hangings; with a good manner and practice in
matters of architecture, on which account he has translated into the
Teuton tongue the works on architecture of Sebastiano Serlio of
Bologna. And Jean Gossart of Mabuse was almost the first who took from
Italy into Flanders the true method of making scenes full of nude
figures and poetical inventions; and by his hand is a large
altar-piece in the Abbey of Middelburg in Zeeland. Of all these
information has been received from Maestro Giovanni Strada of Bruges,
a painter, and from Giovan Bologna of Douai, a sculptor; both Flemings
and men of excellence, as we shall relate in the Treatise on the
Academicians.

As for those of the same province who are still living and in repute,
the first among them, both for his works in painting and for his many
copper-plate engravings, is Franz Floris of Antwerp, a disciple of the
above-mentioned Lambert Lombard. This Floris, who is held to be most
excellent, has worked in such a manner in every field of his
profession, that no one, they say there, has expressed better the
emotions of the soul, sorrow, gladness, and the other passions, and
all with most beautiful and bizarre inventions; insomuch that,
likening him to the Urbinate, they call him the Flemish Raffaello. It
is true that this is not demonstrated to us fully by the printed
sheets, for the reason that the engraver, be he ever so able, never by
a great measure equals the originals or the design and manner of him
who has drawn them. A fellow-disciple with Floris, learning under the
discipline of the same master, has been Willem Key of Breda, and also
of Antwerp, a temperate, serious, and judicious man, and a close
imitator of the life and the objects of nature, and in addition
passing fertile in invention, and one who more than any other executes
his pictures with good gradation and all full of sweetness and grace;
and although he has not the facility, boldness, and terrible force of
his brother-disciple Floris, for all that he is held to be truly
excellent. Michael Coxie, of whom I have spoken above, saying that he
carried the Italian manner into Flanders, is much celebrated among the
Flemish craftsmen for being profoundly serious and making his figures
such that they have in them much of the virile and severe;