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The paper examines Karel van Mander’s consistent descriptions of artistic incompetence, technical mediocrity, and creative failure in Het Schilder-Boeck – or The Book of Painting, first published in Alkmaar 1604 – in the attempt to understand the functionality of his remarks – from an aesthetic, ethical, and pedagogical standpoint – as cautionary tales for apprentices and young patrons. It will be argued that, by establishing a sharp distinction between “excellent masters” and “mediocre painters,” Van Mander’s nar...

Along with paintings, drawings, and prints representing workshops and studios in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, written sources also provide important information concerning the different typologies, functions, and organization of the creative and entrepreneurial spaces of the artist in early modern times. These spaces were often the stage of significant social and cultural exchanges with patrons, commissioners, and collectors, in which art-related explorations coexisted with science-oriented exp...