in his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, often referred to as the Vite. It was published in 1550 and republished in 1568 with woodcuts, which is the version van Mander probably studied. He set about translating this work into Dutch and it was during this project that he was offered the commission to inventory Haarlem's art collection, a job that resulted in the chapters of his book on Early Netherlandish painters. In both books, the lives of the painters are told in the standard "Vita di ..." manner of Catholic saints, extolling the virtues of the painters one by one in several chapters. In van Mander's book many entries on Italian painters were simply translated or adapted from the Italian Vite, but the biographical details on early Netherlandish painters and, in particular the Haarlem painters, are unique and gathered during van Mander's commission. Karel van Mander's book also contains an interpretation of the stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses. This was meant as an aid to artists who wished to paint mythological themes rather than religious ones. Symbolism was very important in painting at the time, and the use of Ovid's characters, combined with the proper use of artistic symbolism allowed the artist to tell a specific story. The last chapter of the Schilder-Boeck describes the meaning of animals and other figures. Legacy Van Mander was the master of Frans Hals. Frans Hals appears not to have shared van Mander's view that history painting was the highest in the hierarchy of genres since Frans Hals produced almost solely portrait paintings. The Schilder-Boeck introduced Dutch artists to Italian art and encouraged them to travel, if not follow the book's instructions on Italian painting methods. Aside from his son Karel van Mander the Younger and Frans Hals, his registered pupils were Cornelis Engelsz, Everard Crynsz van der Maes, Jacobus Martens (landscape painter and father of the painter Jan Martszen de Jonge), Jacob Martsen (genre painter), Jacob van Musscher, Hendrik Gerritsz Pot and François Venant. Van Mander was further influential on art writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cornelis de Bie (Gulden Cabinet, 1662), Joachim von Sandrart (Teutsche Akademie, 1675), Filippo Baldinucci (Notizie de' Professori, 1681), and Arnold Houbraken (Schouburg, 1720) are some of the early biographers who used material from his Schilder-boeck for their biographical sketches of Netherlandish painters. His book is still the most-cited primary source in