FLORIS, FRANS, or more correctly FRANS DE VRIENDT, called FLORIS (1520-1570), Flemish painter. Son of a stone cutter, Cornelis de Vriendt, who died at Antwerp in 1538, he began life as a student of sculpture, but afterwards gave up carving for painting. At the age of 20 he went to Liege and studied with Lambert Lombard. Following in the footsteps of Mabuse, Lambert Lombard had visited Florence, and caught the manner of Salviati and other pupils of Michelangelo and Del Sarto. It was about the time when Schoreel, Coxcie and Heems kerk, after migrating to Rome and imitating the masterpieces of Raphael and Buonarroti, came home to execute Dutch Italian works beneath the level of those produced in the peninsula itself by Leonardo da Pistoia, Nanaccio and Rinaldo of Mantua. Fired by these examples, Floris in his turn wandered across the Alps and appropriated without assimilation the various manner isms of the schools of Lombardy, Florence and Rome. He came home and joined the gild of Antwerp in 154o. He is known to have illustrated the fable of Hercules in ten compositions, and the liberal arts in seven, for Claes Jongeling, a merchant of Ant werp, and adorned the duke of Arschot's palace of Beaumont with 14 colossal panels. The earliest extant canvas by Floris is the "Mars and Venus ensnared by Vulcan" in the Berlin museum , the latest a "Last Judgment" (1566) in the Brussels gallery. Floris owed much of his repute to the cleverness with which his works were transferred to copper by Jerome Cock and Theodore de Galle. He was engaged on a Crucifixion and a Resurrection for the grand prior of Spain when he died on Oct. I, 157o, at Antwerp.