TWO centuries ago he was a shadowy figure known only as the Master of the Death of the Virgin, the otherwise anonymous painter of a fabulous triptych which hangs in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. Now he has a name, Joos van Cleve, and he is recognised as one of the leading lights of 16th-century Netherlandish painting, with more than 100 works confidently attributed to him and his atelier.

The slow disinterment of Joos van Cleve from obscurity is the patient achievement of scholars and collectors since the middle of the 19th century. The fruit of their labour is now summarised in an exemplary monograph by John Oliver Hand. Joos emerges from this long overdue study as one of the most accomplished, influential and attractive painters of his day.

It is a measure of the complexity of Hand’s task that maybe half of the 120 works which he lists also exist as copies. For instance, Joos painted two versions of St Jerome in His Study, of which one leans heavily on the celebrated engraving by Dürer, and there are nearly two dozen copies and variants of both versions. There are 20 copies of Joos’s Madonna of the Cherries, which itself was copied from a work by Giovanni Pedrini, known as Giampetrino, who in turn copied a prototype, no longer in existence, by Leonardo da Vinci.

The notion of copying may offend our modern requirement for novelty in art, but it would be a pity to dismiss a 16th-century master merely for not being Damien Hirst enough. There is still much to be learnt about how the artists of Joos’s time, and their customers, managed to esteem tradition and innovation at the same time.

They were living in uncomfortably exciting times. Antwerp — to which Joos had moved shortly before 1511, from the environs of Kleve on the Rhine near the border between modern Germany and the Netherlands — was the buzzing boomtown of northern Europe. This was the cradle of modern capitalism, and the buzz was trade.

And when Antwerp merchants looked at uplifting pictures they did not at all mind seeing other merchants — such as the Wise Men who brought rare and costly gifts from the East, just as they did. A propos Joos’s many versions of The Adoration of the Magi, Hand notes that a striking number of Antwerp merchants were baptised with one of the names tradition had ascribed to the Magi — Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar. No doubt their parents hoped their offspring would be so rich that they too could splash around the gold, frankincense and myrrh.

In a wealthy cosmopolitan melting pot such as Antwerp it is not surprising that the successful artists — those with busy workshops — had eclectic tastes too. When one had a clever idea, all the rivals soon piled in to copy it. So, for example, when Joachim Patinir, a contemporary of Joos and a fellow member of the Antwerp painters guild, started to paint limpidly visionary imagined landscapes in the backgrounds of his devotional works, the idea was adopted almost instantaneously right across Europe.

The biographical details of Joos van Kleve himself are still sketchy. Born in or near Kleve around 1485-90, he came to Antwerp, possibly via Bruges, and was admitted to the painters’ guild in 1511. Apart from visiting France — where he painted a portrait of King François I — and possibly Genoa, he lived and worked in Antwerp until his death in 1540 or 1541.

In the absence of any more biography we just have to concentrate on Joos’s paintings. One of his finest is the Madonna and Child (now in the Fitzwillliam Museum, Cambridge). The delicacy of the modelling of the Madonna’s face, the lightest sfumatura of violet-blue in the shadows, is reminiscent of Leonardo, but the super-focused, touch-me-feel-me painting of the cloak and the fur lining on which Christ sleeps is pure Netherlandish virtuosity.

Joos van Cleve, The Complete Paintings by John Oliver Hand (Yale University Press, £50)