Michiel Coxie (1497/1501- 1592?) Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, 1580s, Oil on oak, St. Rumbold’s cathedral, Mechelen
Michiel Coxcie (1497/1501–1592?), The Martyrdom of Saint George, 1580s, oil on oak, St Rumbold’s Cathedral, Mechelen
Michiel Coxcie, one of the most influential artists of the sixteenth century in the Habsburg Netherlands, was born in Mechelen and received formative training first under Bernard van Orley in Brussels, then during his extended stay in Italy. He is documented in Rome from around 1530 and remained until 1539, arriving in a city still raw from the Sack of 1527, its workshops disrupted, its leading painters dispersed, and its patronage networks only beginning to recover under Clement VII and then Paul III.
Raphael had been dead for a decade by the time Coxcie arrived. What he found instead was the overwhelming physical presence of Raphael’s legacy: the Vatican Stanze, the loggia decorations, and the compositions that continued to circulate through the print market. Marcantonio Raimondi’s workshop had been broken up by the Sack, but the plates survived and the prints kept circulating. Agostino Veneziano, one of the most important engravers in the Raimondi tradition, returned to Rome in 1531 and was active there through much of the decade. It was with Agostino that Coxcie later collaborated on the Fable of Psyche series, a set of designs so thoroughly absorbed in the Raphaelesque idiom that they were subsequently attributed to Raphael himself — a telling measure of how completely Coxcie had mastered the language he had come to study.
Giulio Romano, Raphael’s most gifted pupil and the principal heir to his workshop, had already left for Mantua in 1524 and escaped the Sack entirely. Coxcie could not have encountered him in person, though Romano’s compositions were widely available through prints. Michelangelo, by contrast, was very much present — born in 1475, he would not die until 1564 — and Coxcie is documented to have moved in his circle. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, completed in 1512, was there to be studied directly, and its impact on Coxcie’s figure types is unmistakable: the muscular contrapposto, the monumental scale, the sense of bodies under physical and psychological strain. Antiquity formed the third pillar of his Roman education, and Coxcie drew directly on works such as the Apollo Citharoedus, the Torso Belvedere, and the Falling Gaul, all of which surface in his figural compositions after his return north.
His first major Roman commission, the fresco decoration of the chapel of Cardinal Willem van Enckenvoirt in Santa Maria dell’Anima, was completed around 1534 and impressed Vasari for the completeness with which Coxcie had assimilated the Italian manner. By the time he returned north in 1539 he had become a member of the Compagnia di San Luca, among the first Flemish painters to receive that distinction, and had contributed to the decoration of the new St Peter’s Basilica. This assimilation of Italian models eventually earned him the sobriquet ‘the Flemish Raphael’. Yet, for all his technical mastery and clarity of design, Coxcie’s figures can sometimes appear detached from one another, their expressions fixed in a manner that reduces the sense of natural interaction.
His relationship with the Habsburg court was not incidental to his career but structural to it. On the death of Bernard van Orley in 1541, Coxcie succeeded him as court painter to Mary of Hungary, Governor of the Netherlands and sister of Charles V, for whom he contributed to the decoration of the castle at Binche. Charles V himself became a significant patron, and when Philip II succeeded to the throne in 1555 the royal support was maintained without interruption. The most celebrated product of this relationship was Philip II’s commission of a full-scale copy of the Ghent Altarpiece, executed between 1557 and 1558 after the king accepted that he could not acquire the original. Philip also commissioned Coxcie to copy Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, a work that would eventually replace the original at the Escorial when Philip acquired the panel itself for the royal collection. The export of Coxcie’s works to Spain and other Catholic territories was not limited to these royal commissions. Karel van Mander noted in his Schilder-Boeck that Coxcie’s finest works had left the Netherlands, bought cheaply and sold abroad at considerable profit, a remark that points to an active secondary market for his paintings reaching across Catholic Europe well beyond the immediate circle of Habsburg patronage.
These monumental paintings of 1586–1588 in St Rumbold’s Cathedral, Mechelen, present a particularly intriguing case in the study of his late career. The destruction of Mechelen’s church interiors began with the English Fury of 1580 and continued under Calvinist rule until the Catholic restoration of 1585, after which civic and ecclesiastical patrons sought rapid replacements. Many of Coxcie’s own earlier works had been among the losses, and the reuse of proven compositional repertoires in the late commissions is plausibly understood against that background, alongside the practical pressures of a large workshop meeting urgent demand in the final years of a very long career.
TThe question of whether these altarpieces were executed by Coxcie’s own hand, however, is less straightforward than it might appear, and one the scholarship has not systematically addressed. Archival documents recording payments to a named artist do not in themselves confirm autograph execution; workshop practice in the sixteenth-century Netherlands routinely saw masters supply designs, oversee production, and receive payment for work substantially carried out by assistants or journeymen. At a date when Coxcie was in his mid-to-late eighties, the possibility that these compositions were realised largely by his workshop, from cartoons or earlier designs bearing his authority, cannot be set aside on the basis of documentary evidence alone.
The circumstances of his death also further illustrate how biographical tradition can calcify around a striking detail of uncertain origin. The story of a nonagenarian painter falling from a staircase — or, in some versions, from scaffolding while still actively restoring his own work — has the quality of an exemplary anecdote, the kind that early biographers and later compilers found irresistible precisely because it confirmed a pleasing image of indefatigable old age. Such stories attach themselves to artists’ lives through the retelling of Karel van Mander and his successors, accumulating authority through repetition rather than documentation.
Michiel Coxcie (1497/1501–1592?) The Martyrdom of Saint George, 1580s, oil on oak, St Rumbold’s Cathedral, Mechelen
References
Jonckheere, K. (ed.) (2013) Michiel Coxcie (1499–1592) and the Giants of His Age. Trans. M. Hoyle and I. Forster. London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller/Brepols.
Jonckheere, K. and Suykerbuyk, R. (eds.) (2012) Art after Iconoclasm: Painting in the Netherlands between 1566 and 1585. Turnhout: Brepols
Woollett, A.T. (2012) ‘Michiel Coxcie and the revitalization of religious painting in the Southern Netherlands after 1566’, in Jonckheere, K. and Suykerbuyk, R. (eds.) Art after Iconoclasm: Painting in the Netherlands between 1566 and 1585. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 75–94.