The monograph by Richard Judson (published in Amsterdam in 1970) could hardly expect to drag Dirck Barendz. (Amsterdam 1534-92) out of semi-obscurity : since Barendz. remains the painter of a single remarkable picture, that extraordinary Mannerist retable at Gouda which promised to make him into a kind of Netherlandish Schiavone or Greco. His few other religious pictures cited by Van Mander have all disappeared, no doubt largely on account of the iconoclasic activities of the time and the anti-Catholic reaction in the Northern Low Countries.