Bartholomeus Spranger, a Flemish Mannerist painter who has served for eight years as an assistant to Federico Zuccari, moves in 1575 from Rome to Vienna, where he works for Emperor Maximilian II as a painter, draftsman, and etcher, peopling his paintings with contorted nude figures.

Bartholomaeus Spranger had assisted in completing an interrupted fresco project during a ten-year period spent in Rome and Parma.

While working in Paris around 1565, the Antwerp native had been influenced by the work of Francesco Primaticcio and Niccolò dell' Abbate.

Returning to Rome in 1567, he had become an assistant to Taddeo Zuccari, and had later worked for the emperor Maximilian II in Vienna, where he had made a successful career.

Maximilian's son, Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, is to prove an even better patron than his father would have been, and Spranger will never leave his service.

The court had soon transferred to Prague, safer from the regular Turkish invasions.

He had in 1581 been appointed court painter in Prague by Rudolf, and will remain in this city hereafter.

Rudolf is to become an obsessive collector of old and new art, his artists mixing with the astronomers, clockmakers, botanists, and "wizards, alchemists and kabbalists" who Rudolf also gathers around him.

Spranger, noted for his paintings of nudes executed in the late Mannerist style, employs mannered poses, slender, elongated bodies, and a gleaming, brittle texture in his efforts to develop a Northern artistic canon of the human figure.

The figures smile invitingly, and the influence of Parmigianino and Correggio is evident in their voluptuous contours.

Bartholomeus Spranger, on completing his training with Cornelis van Dalem, Jan Mandijn, and Frans Mostaert, had traveled to Paris and Italy in 1565, when he was about nineteen.

The Flemish Mannerist has worked on wall paintings in various churches.

At Rome, he had become, like El Greco, a protégé of Giulio Clovio.

Pope Pius V had appointed him court painter in 1570.

He had been summoned to Vienna by Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, who died soon after his arrival in 1576, but his successor Rudolf II had ben even more keen to employ him, and in 1581 he had been appointed court painter, the court having by then moved its seat to Prague, where he has remained.

Aegidius Sadeler, who lived in his house in Prague for some time, and Hendrik Goltzius have made engravings of his paintings, spreading Spranger's fame around Europe.

Spranger's paintings for Rudolf mostly depict mythological nudes in various complex poses, with some connection to the Emperor's esoteric Late-Renaissance philosophical ideas.

His paintings are the most characteristic of the final phase of Northern Mannerism; by far the best collection is in Vienna.

His drawings have great energy, in a very free technique.