16th Century Dutch

History and portrait painter. Humanist, musician, poet, engineer and architect. A member of the Flemish School.

Scorel introduced Italian Renaissance painting into the Netherlands, just as his master Jan Gossaert would do in Utrecht.

He trained with a number of local artists in Alkmaar, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Utrecht. However, the greatest influence on his work would come from the great masters he met throughout his life: Durer, whom he visited in Nuremberg; Giorgione, whose work he knew in Venice; Raphael and Michelangelo, with whom he coincided in Rome. There are no records of his membership in any of the painting guilds, which would lead us to infer that he probably never obtained the title of master.

A tireless traveller, there are references to periods spent in Cologne, Spira, Strasburg, Basel, Nuremberg, Austria (Carinthia) and Venice, from where he embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. After visiting Jerusalem, he returned to Italy via Rhodes (1520). Upon his return to Rome in 1522, Pope Adrian VI (also known as Adrian of Utrecht, Regent of Spain in 1520 when Charles V was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire), appointed him painter to the Vatican and later, after Raphael’s death, keeper of the Belvedere papal collection.

After the sudden death of the Pope in September 1523, he returned to Holland stopping in France on his way, where he turned down an invitation from Francis I to remain in the French court. He settled in Utrecht, and in 1528 he became canon of Saint Mary’s. From 1536 to 1538 he worked in the castle of Breda and in 1540 and 1549 in Utrecht, decorating the victorious entrances of Charles V and Philip II in that city. He also worked for the king of Sweden, and in 1550 he restored the Van Eyck triptych in Ghent with the assistance of Lancelot Blondeel.

Many of his works were destroyed in the 1566 iconoclast revolt during the Eighty Year’s War, when groups of rebels moved from Western Flanders to Breda destroying images as they went.

Antonis Mor was one of his main disciples.