Art by Frans Floris

Floris trained in Rome under the direct influence of Michelangelo and Raphael before returning to Antwerp around 1545, where he was soon nicknamed the "Flemish Raphael" and built one of the largest painting workshops in the Netherlands, reportedly training over a hundred assistants using life-size painted reference heads as teaching models. His most ambitious work, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1554), made for Antwerp Cathedral, had its side panels destroyed in the 1566 Beeldenstorm, the wave of Protestant iconoclastic riots that tore through the Low Countries, and he reportedly stopped painting seriously not long after, sinking into debt. His own recorded motto was blunt: when I work, I live; when I play, I die.