Coecke van Aelst, Pieter (1502-1550)

Netherlands painter, print publisher, and designer. He ran a busy workshop in Brussels, producing not only prints and paintings, but also designs for tapestries and stained-glass windows. He is remembered not for his own works - many of which have been lost - but for helping to spread the influence of the Italian Renaissance to northern Europe through his many prints. His most important printmaker was Pieter Brueghel.

Also influential was his own summary of the major architectural treatise De architectura/On Architecture by the Roman architect Vitruvius. His wife, Meyken Verhulst, was also an artist.

Coecke was born in Aelst and is believed to have studied under Bernard van Orley. He is recorded as a master at Antwerp in 1527. He visited Italy about 1530 and Constantinople in 1533; in 1535 he may have accompanied Emperor Charles V on his Tunis campaign. He was still at Antwerp in 1544, but subsequently moved to Brussels, where he died.

No surviving paintings of Coecke's can be identified with absolute certainty. His most famous composition, the Last Supper (c. 1527), is loosely based upon Leonardo da Vinci's famous fresco; it exists in several versions, all possibly replicas of a lost original.