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| Baptism of Christ 1588 |
Dutch painter Cornelis van Haarlem (1562-1638) is now remembered as one of the 'Haarlem Mannerists' working under Italian influence toward the turn of the seventeenth century.
In his painting of the baptism of Christ (above) the central action of the picture – the actual baptism – takes place in the far distance, upstream, receding into near-invisibility. The foreground is occupied by anonymous bathers. One prominent detail is the bottom of the largest bather's dirty foot, thrust toward the viewer.
Recent writing on Caravaggio regularly draws attention to the prominence of bare dirty feet in his paintings, as if no one else before him had ever dared to paint such things. But here we see Cornelis van Haarlem using the same trope in the 1580s – a time when Caravaggio himself was still an unknown Lombard teenager.
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| Fall of Ixion 1588 |
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| Fall of Ixion (engraving) 1588 |
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| Two Followers of Cadmus Devoured by a Dragon 1588 |
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| Two Followers of Cadmus Devoured by a Dragon (engraving) 1588 |
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| The Fall of Man 1592 |
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| Bathsheba 1594 |
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| The Preaching of St. John the Baptist 1602 |
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| Jupiter and other Olympian Gods urging Apollo to take up the reins of his Chariot c. 1610 |
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| Venus & Adonis 1614 |
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| Neptune & Amphitrite 1583 |
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| Cornelis van Haarlem Self-Portrait c. 1588-90 |