Bernard Van Orley

Born in Brussels around 1488, Van Orley trained under his father Valentin, also a painter. By 1518^[3] he held the position of court painter to Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands and the most powerful patron north of the Alps. When Margaret died in 1530 her successor Mary of Hungary retained him in the same role. His portraits of the Habsburg circle are considered his most focused work: the Portrait of Doctor Georges de Zelle (1519, Musees Royaux, Brussels) and the Portrait of Charles V (c.1516, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest) operate with a quiet Eyckian precision that his altarpieces sometimes sacrifice to decorative ambition.

His most celebrated painting is the Altarpiece of the Ordeals of Job (1521^[3], Musees Royaux, Brussels), commissioned by Margaret of Austria as a gift for Antoine de Lalaing. Van Orley inscribed it with his name, the date, and the motto Elx syne tyt Orley (meaning "Everything in its own time"), a claim of authorial identity unusual in Flemish panel painting. The central panel depicts the Destruction of the Children of Job, a subject without precedent in northern art, combining Boschian turbulence with foreshortened figures drawn from Raphael.

Weaving was where his decorative instincts worked most effectively. The Hunts of Maximilian series and the Battle of Pavia cycle (1531^[3]), designed for Charles V, are among the finest woven hangings of the period; Raphael's narrative idiom translated more naturally to that horizontal format than to panel painting. Van Orley sat at the transition between the medieval painter-craftsman and the Renaissance artist as intellectual director, inventing compositions and overseeing workshops rather than applying paint himself.