The Golden Age (Bacchanalia) Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem

Under the influence of Italian Renaissance painting, mythological scenes with a moralistic message became widespread in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. The stories they depicted, most of which were derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, provided a pretext to paint partially or completely naked figures in shameless naturalness. Such portrayals of nudes were extremely popular, not only among the ruling classes, but also among bourgeois patrons of the arts.
Large numbers of subjects offering opportunities to show nude models were painted by two groups of painters active in important artistic centres, the Haarlem Mannerists and the Flemish Romanists.The paintings of Karel van Mander, Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem, who jointly ran an art school in Haarlem, were mostly influenced by the mannerist style of Bartholomeus Spranger, who worked in the Prague court of Emperor Rudolph II. The Flemish Romanists, meanwhile, who operated out of Antwerp, primarily followed the example set by exponents of Italian mannerism.