Charles, a painter, poet, and biographer, born in 1548, at the village of Meuleheke, near Courtray, in West Flanders. At an early age he gave indications of a genius both for poetry and painting; and as he spent his life in the cultivation of these arts, it was marked with no important events or striking incidents. After spending some years at Rome in the study of art, he returned to his native country in 1577; but in the civil war then raging in the Netherlands, he narrowly escaped from the Spanish soldiery, and was obliged to take refuge in flight. In 1683 he found an asylum at Haarlem, where he resided twenty years, and he died at Amsterdam in 1606. His chief literary work is The Lives of the Painters, but he also translated the Iliad, the Elegiacs, and Georgics of Virgil, and the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and wrote many dramatic pieces.