Lucas of Leyden

LUCAS OF LEYDEN. - Flemish painter and engraver, born perhaps in May or June 1494, died at Leyden between May and August 1533. The earliest documents relating to him go back to 1514, in connection with his enlistment in the city troops.

His fame is linked above all to his engravings, on evangelical, historical, allegorical and satirical subjects, directly dependent on the spirit and technique of Dürer. Even his considerable painted work depends greatly on his graphic activity; his problems of composition, space and expression matured under Italian influence, so that onto the original genre painting - as in the Chess Players, the Card Games, etc., of which various copies exist, in the Sermon in Church of the Amsterdam Museum (of c. 1517) - onto the romantic expressiveness of the human physiognomy, as in the Self-Portrait of the Brunswick Museum, in the portraits both female and male of Richmond, London, Rehenca, Groningen, etc., are grafted lively echoes of the statuary plasticity of Mannerism and traces of Leonardo's chiaroscuro, especially visible in the Last Judgment of the Leyden Museum, and in the Lot and His Daughters of the Louvre. There also remain numerous panels on religious subjects in Philadelphia, Aachen, Leyden, Munich, Vienna, Richmond, Brussels, Berlin, etc., which bear witness to his dense and complex art.

Eugenio Battisti