Aertgen van Leyden

Aertgen Claesz. van Leyden (Leiden, c. 1498 - Leiden, 1564) was a Dutch Renaissance painter, draughtsman and designer of stained glass. The son of a weaver, he is recorded as an apprentice of Cornelis Engebrechtsz. in 1516, and appears in the Leiden city records as a painter from 1521 until his death. His importance lies in the variety of his output and in the difficulty of identifying his work with certainty.

Karel van Mander reported that, besides oil painting, he supplied hundreds of designs for stained-glass windows. His early pictures reflect his teacher Engebrechtsz., while later ones absorb the influence of Jan van Scorel, Maarten van Heemskerck, Frans Floris and Lucas van Leyden, with whom he is sometimes confused. He probably travelled to Germany before 1530, where he may have met Hans Baldung Grien.

Because his style changed so much, many of his paintings were long credited to other artists. Only the discovery in the late 1960s of the Last Judgment triptych in Valenciennes, painted in 1555 for the Montfoort family, allowed scholars to reconstruct his manner tentatively and assign him a small group of works, including The Calling of St Anthony in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and possibly a fragment of The Temptation of Saint Anthony in Brussels, linked to a portrait of a donor in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.