FLORIS, Frans, or more correctly Frans de Vriendt called Floris (1520-1570) was one of a large family trained to the study of art in Flanders. Son of a stone-cutter, Cornelis de Vriendt, who died at Antwerp in 1538, he began life as a student of sculpture, but afterwards gave up carving for painting. At the age of twenty he went to Liège, and took lessons from Lambert Lombard, a pupil of Mabuse, whose travels in Italy had transformed a style truly Flemish into that of a mongrel Leonardesque. Following in the footsteps of Mabuse, Lambert Lombard had visited Florence, and caught the manner of Salviati and other pupils of Michelangelo and Del Sarto. It was about the time when Schoreel, Coxcie, and Heemskerk, after migrating to Rome and imitating the masterpieces of Raphael and Buonarroti, came home to execute Dutch-Italian works beneath the level of those produced in the peninsula itself by Leonardo da Pistoia, Nanaccio, and Rinaldo of Mantua. Fired by these examples, Floris in his turn wandered across the Alps, and appropriated without assimilation the various mannerisms of the schools of Lombardy, Florence, and Rome. Bold, quick, and resolute, he saw how easy it would be to earn a livelihood and acquire a name by drawing for engraversand painting on a large scale after the fashion of Vasari. He came home, joined the guild of Antwerp in 1540, and quickly opened a school from which 120 disciples are stated to have issued. Floris painted strings of large pictures for the country houses of Spanish nobles and the villas of Antwerp patricians. He is known to have illustrated the fable of Hercules in ten compositions, and the liberal arts in seven, for Claes Jongeling, a merchant of Antwerp, and adorned the duke of Arschot’s palace of Beaumont with fourteen colossal panels. ...