(b Ghent or Bruges, c. 1501–2; d Basle, 1556). South Netherlandish glass painter and religious sect leader. First mentioned in Delft, where he married and settled in 1524, Jorisz. was trained as a painter of stained glass. A convert first to Lutheranism and later to Anabaptism, he was arrested for blasphemy in 1528 and was fined, whipped and had a hole bored in his tongue. He was then banished from Holland and sentenced (in absentia) to be hanged. Calling himself ‘the Third David’, he founded his own Anabaptist sect, took his family and followers to Basle and passed himself off as a Dutch nobleman, ‘Johannes von Bruck’. Living on funds from his Dutch publications—including the Wunderboeck (Deventer, 1542), illustrated with his own woodcut designs—and from secret donations, he lived in the Spiesshof on the upper Heuberg in Basle, and in a series of castles in the countryside. Although quite a few citizens of Basle seem to have known his real identity, he was not denounced until three years after his death, when his body was exhumed and burnt under the gallows, together with a portrait and his heretical writings.

• Jorisz., David
  • Baptists and Congregationalists