The Feast of the Sea Gods

Floris is the painter who carried the Italian manner into Antwerp. He learned his trade in the workshop of Lambert Lombard at Liège, went south in the 1540s as far as Rome and Mantua, and came home in 1547 to set up the largest history workshop in the city, training the generation of painters that followed him. His subjects were the ones the Italians had made their own — scripture, Ovid, the gods — and his muscular, Italianate figure style is the reason he stands at the head of the Flemish Romanists: the whole school of Antwerp history painting in the second half of the sixteenth century passes through him. The inscription on this panel dates it to 1561, the middle of that career and the moment at which the large mythological histories were his chief work; painted on oak at 126 × 226 cm, it is one of the most ambitious of them. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.