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Willem Key was one of the leading portrait and history painters in sixteenth-century Antwerp. He was born in Breda in 1516. Following in his older brother Wouter’s footsteps, Willem went to Antwerp to become a painter. He studied under Pieter Coecke (1529) and later, like Frans Floris, apprenticed in the workshop of Lambert Lombard in Liège before becoming a free master in 1542. In 1568, just when he had reached the top of his abilities and enjoyed the patronage of outstanding individuals and institutions, Willem Key died suddenly. The artist’s biographer and painter Karel van Mander tells us that Key was blessed with ‘Sulcke edele gheesten,’ such a noble mind. And, he had a ‘Docta manus,’ a learned hand, as the Bruges humanist and painter Domenicus Lampsonius phrased this topos in 1572.