born May 1548, Meulebeke, Flanders, Spanish Netherlands
died Sept. 2, 1606, Amsterdam, Neth.
Dutch painter, poet, and writer.
Born of a noble family, after much wandering he settled in Haarlem in 1583 and founded a successful academy of painting with Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz (1562–1638). He is best known for The Book of Painters (1604), which contains about 175 biographies of Dutch, Flemish, and German painters of the 15th–16th centuries; it became for the northern countries what Giorgio Vasari 's Lives of the Painters had been for Italy.