THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF OUR FAITH: STRATA #2

Karl van Mander (1548-1606) Mennonite Painter, Educator, Hymnist, and Playwright

Karl van Mander (1548-1606) grew up in Flanders in a Mennonite home. He was talented in art and literature.  In his early 20s he wrote eight plays that were performed all across the Netherlands. Then at the age of 24, van Mander traveled to Rome and studied painting under Michael Vasari. Vasari had been a student of Michelangelo.  Van Mander’s fellow students under Vasari included Tintoretto and El Greco.  Due to his accomplishments in Rome he had a private audience with the Pope Gregory XII.  After six years in Rome he returned to Flanders, married and moved to Harleem and became active in the local Mennonite community.  In Harleem he founded a school for painters in 1579 along with another Mennonite Corneliusz Cornelius.  The school was in existence until the late 19th century.  The school attracted many outstanding artists including Mennonites such as Franz Hals, Jacob, Solomon and Isaac Ruisdael. Van Mander’s hymns were published with the title The Golden Harp. This book was in use by many Dutch Mennonites until the 1870s.  After a decade of intense work in Harleem, van Mander moved to Amsterdam and founded yet another school for artists and students of classical literature.  In the 1700s this school became the foundation for the University of Amsterdam. In his final decade, he published a landmark book The Lives of the Painters (Het Schilderboek).  This volume has never gone out of print from its first edition in 1604 till now.  In the century that followed Amsterdam was the center of the Dutch Golden Age and many credit van Mander as the founder of that glorious age. At his funeral in 1606, more than 20,000 people lined the streets of Amsterdam as his coffin was carried from the Mennonite Church to the burial grounds outside the city. Surely the Lord would say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”