Gillis Coignet

Name
Gillis Coignet
Date of birth
1538
Place of birth
Antwerp/Belgium
Date of death
1599
Place of death
Hamburg/Germany
Biography
Gillis Coignet was a major disseminator of Italianate, especially Titianesque, models in the North before 1600. Apprenticed to an obscure Antwerp painter (Lambert Wenselyns,) Coignet was registered as a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1561, and was in Italy by 1568, where he attended the Florentine Accademia del Disegno (registered as Giulio Cognietta) and worked on the Villa d’Este at Tivoli under the Mannerist painter Federico Zuccaro (c. 1540 –1609). Coignet returned to Antwerp, where he prospered and served as dean of the Guild of St Luke and had several students, including the talented Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1562-1638). According to Van Mander, Coignet sold copies made by his pupils under his own name.

After the fall of Antwerp to the Spanish Catholics in 1585, all Protestants were given four years to settle their affairs and leave the city. Coignet moved to Amsterdam in 1586, where he had a decisive impact as a Lutheran artist working in an Italianate mode. He then went to Hamburg in 1593, where he died six years later.

Coignet is known for his Venetian manner of painting, working with rapid brushstrokes after the example of Titian, and emulating the brilliant Venetian use of colour, but he also won renown as a master of nocturne painting, producing night pieces, sometimes highlighted with touches of gold. A French element in his work reflects the complex ties of Antwerp painters with the Paris market and their attempts to also cater to the Italianate tastes of the French court.