LUCA da LEYDA. - Flemish painter and engraver, b., perhaps, in May or June 1494, d. at Leyda between May and Aug. 1533. The earliest documents concerning him date from 1514, in connection with his enlistment in the civic troops.
His fame is chiefly associated with his engravings, on Gospel, historical, allegorical, and satirical subjects, directly dependent on the spirit and technique of Dürer. His considerable painted oeuvre likewise depends greatly on his graphic activity; his problems of composition, space, and expression matured under Italian influence, so that upon his original genre painting—as in the Chess Players, the Card Games, etc., of which various copies exist, in the Sermon in Church in the Amsterdam Museum (c. 1517)—and upon the romantic expressiveness of the human physiognomy, as in the Self-Portrait in the Brunswig Museum, in the female and male portraits at Richmond, London, Rehenca, Groninga, etc., there are grafted lively echoes of the sculptural plasticity of Mannerism and traces of Leonardesque chiaroscuro, especially visible in the Last Judgment in the Leyda Museum and in the Lot and Daughters in the Louvre. There also remain numerous panels on religious subjects in Philadelphia, Aquisgrana, Leyda, Mo-
naco, Vienna, Richmond, Brussels, Berlin, etc., which bear witness to his dense and complex art.