Quentin Massys is one of the great historic names of Art,
Quentin Massys is one of the great
historic names of Art, the sound of which everybody knows, his reputation in
England is probably grounded on fewer facts than that of any other painter of so
high an order. This is due partly to the few pictures he painted, partly to the
little that is known about his life, and partly to the fact that there is no
important work of his in England, except the celebrated ‘ Misers’ at Windsor.
That he painted these 'Misers,’ that he was a blacksmith, and that there is a
romantic story that he resigned the hammer for the paintbrush to gain abride,
probably to this day represents the average knowledge of himself and his works
current in this country.
Like most knowledge of the kind, it is insufficient and inaccurate. Although the
fame of the ‘Misers’ is not, perhaps, unduly great as a piece of painting, its
merit in this particular is not its only claim to consideration, and it is a
disparagement to the higher work of Massys that this picture should be the basis
of his reputation ; and though we need not quite banish to the realm of myth the
delightful story of his wooing, the title of blacksmith does not fairly
represent to English ears the artist who could fabricate such elegant pieces of
ironwork as those which decorate the well at Antwerp, the font at Louvain, and
the tomb of his first wife at Aerschot, all of which are ascribed to him.
Had Quentin Massys painted nothing but his ‘ Misers’ and other pictures of a
like class, he would have deserved a high place in Art, not only on account of
technical skill, but as an originator; for these character pieces are the
earliest pictures in which an artist has deemed the portrayal of human
character, apart from portrait or history (secular or religious), sufficient
motive for a picture. But great as is his title to special recognition as one of
the apostles of secular Art, the brother of Meekenen and Dfirer, and the
artistic ancestor of the whole school of genre painters, it is in his great
renderings of scenes from sacred and legendary history, as in the great
altar-pieces now in the Museums at Antwerp and Brussels, that the extraordinary
originality as well as power of his genius is revealed. In these he shows
himself not only a great painter, but a poet, who can imagine great scenes of
terror and pathos with a combination of force and beauty equalled by no northern
artist of his time. It is said that he never went to Italy, and if this be the
case, the production of such a work as the altar-piece which he painted for the
fraternity of St. Anne at Louvain seems little less than a miracle. Scarcely
less wonderful, as an advance in modern spirit, though less Italian in
character, is the famous altar-piece at Antwerp. In both he appears as the first
Flemish artist to subordinate the landscape and the detail to human expression.
Not content, as the Van Eycks and Memlinc had been before him, to tell his story
by arranging small figures in appropriate attitudes in a beautiful landscape,
making of the whole a scene remarkable more for its arrangement and color than
for any attempt to express the sentiments of the actors, he drew his figures
large, and relegated the landscape to the background, throwing his whole power
into the drawing of the human form and the expression of human passion. But
while he thus strode in front of his countrymen, he abandoned nothing of the
beauty which they had felt. His landscapes have all their beautiful and tender
tree-drawing, all their luminous depth of blue air; and the same distinctly
Flemish force and individuality of character which we trace with so much delight
in the numerous and noble heads in the famous ‘ Adoration of the Lamb,’ we find
in his faces also, however strongly moved by emotion; the same pure brilliant
hues and transparency which make the earliest Flemish pictures still glow like
gems, glorify his own with undiminished lustre. Whether or not he went to Italy,
he went out and met the Italians in spirit.
Dtirer was drawing ungainly figures, and contorting his draperies into the most
unlovely of folds, Massys, with a sense of beauty of form and harmony of line
unknown to his greater contemporary, clothed handsome men and comely women in
robes of flowing grace. On the other hand, the influence of Italian Art had not
on him the baneful effect which it had on his contemporary Mabuse, or on the
later Italianisers, such as Otho Venius ; it beautified without effeminizing
either his form or his sentiment. He stood between the stiff realistic masters
of the past and the graceful idealists of the future, clinging to all that was
noble in the one, yearning to all that was beautiful in the other, painting
living men and women as he saw them without idealization, but choosing
appropriate and beautiful models, and filling their faces with emotion natural
to the part they had to act.
The exact date when Quentin Massys was born is not known, but it was about
1466,01‘ twenty-six years after the year which saw the death of ]ohn Van Eyck
and the birth of Hans Memlinc, and more than a hundred years before the birth of
Rubens, the next great genius of the Flemish school. It may help the reader to
estimate his chronological position among great artists to state that Giovanni
Bellini was then forty years old, Leonardo da Vinci a youth of fourteen, and
that Michael Angelo, Titian, and Raphael were born nine, eleven, and sixteen
years after him respectively, while Albrecht Dfirer was his junior by some five
years. There has been much dispute as to whether Quentin was born at Louvain or
Antwerp, but recent researches amongst the archives of the Church of Notre-Dame,
in the latter town, prove the existence of a family of his name resident at
Antwerp for some years anterior to his birth, and the arguments for Louvain may
be said to be demolished by the writer of the article on the artist in the
excellent catalogue of the Museum at Antwerp. The most probable assertion which
can therefore be made about his birth is, that it took place at Antwerp after
the year I460; but the first incontestable fact which is known of his history is
that he was received as a master by the famous guild of St. Luke at Antwerp in
1491, at which time he was probably from thirty to thirty-five years of age, as
he is said to have exercised the craft of a blacksmith before he turned painter.
The only story relating to a period before this is that already alluded to of
his first love, which, though dismissed by the writer in the Antwerp catalogue
as apocryphal, is too pretty to be lost, and, we may add, not sufficiently
disproved, for though there is no contemporary authentication of it, the story
must have been current not long after his death, as in 1572 it formed the motive
of the lines by Lampsonius, which were composed for the portrait of Quentin,
published at Antwerp by Hieronymus Cock in that year. The most important
opponent of the tale is Charles Van Mander, who ascribes his change from the
forge to the studio to a serious illness, which caused him to seek occupation in
illuminating pictures of the saints while too weak to wield the hammer, and thus
to discover his genius for color and to acquire a taste for painting. This tale,
though not so romantic, is still an interesting one, and the reader is at
present at liberty to adopt either explanation : that he began life as a
blacksmith or artistic worker of iron all his biographers are agreed.
The love story, if false, is a good instance of the vitality of traditions of a
romantic character, for Tampsonius’s lines, in which that learned poet makes
good use of Vulcan and Venus, are, as it were, echoed in the epitaph on the
monument set up in Antwerp Cathedral to commemorate his centenary. This tablet,
now removed to the Museum, contains the oftenquoted line “ Connubiali:
amor ex mulcibre fccit Apellem."
The great estimation in which Massys was held personally, and the reputation of
his works, make it remarkable that so few details of his life have come down to
us. We are told that he was a great friend to music and poetry, and on intimate
terms with the men of letters at Antwerp; that Erasmus and Petrus ZEgidius sent
their portraits by Massys to Sir Thomas More, who celebrates him in elegant
Latin verse. We know, from a record in Albrecht Diirer’s Diary of his visit to
the Low Countries (1520-21), that he went to the house of “ Master Quentin," and
we know that he lived in Antwerp till his death, occupying first a house in the
Rue des Tanneurs, and then another in the Rue des Arquebusiers; that he was
married twice, and had six children by his first wife, Adelaide Van Twylt—Peter,
James, John, Quentin, Paul, and Catherine; that he died in the latter half of
the year i530, or the beginning of 1531, leaving his second wife, Catherine
Heyens, a widow with seven children-Quentin, Hubert, Abraham, Petronella,
Catherine, Claire, and Susanne. The names of four of his pupils; Ariaen, Willem
Muelenbroec, Eduwart Portugalois, and Hennen Boechmaker, may be said truly, a
warm heart and a sound head, to this smith and painter of Antwerp.
His pictures, other than portraits, may be divided into two very distinct
classes—religioiis pictures and those which have been not inappropriately termed
his “money pieces." The most celebrated of the latter are the \Vindsor ‘Misers,’
the ‘Banker and his Wife,’ in the Louvre, and ‘The Accountant,’ in the Museum at
Antwerp. The success of these novel works begot a number of imitators, amongst
whom were his son John, a German named Joest, and Marinus Van Ryomerswalen, or
Reymerswalen, to whom is now ascribed the ‘ Money Changers ’ in the National
Gallery (VVynn Ellis gift), formerly attributed to Quentin Massys. Of his
religious paintings the only examples in England of the existence of which we
are aware are the ‘Salvator Mundi,' and the ‘Virgin Mary’ in the National
Gallery, replicas of which are at Antwerp, Heidelberg, and Turin. There is a
Magdalen, half-length, three-quarter size, to close the tale of the authentic
records of his life. It is, however, right to mention that in M. P. Génard’s “De
Vlaemsche School," published in 1855, is an extract from a MS. attributed to
Molanus, in which it is stated that Quentin was bom at Louvain, and that after
having exercised the craft of a smith he learnt painting under Roger Van der \Veyden
(the younger) at Brussels, and then settled at Antwerp. Van Mander, on the other
hand, asserts that he had no master. Fortunately the meagre details of his life
are not all that is left to us. ln his pictures, though these are very few in
comparison with the length of his life and the greatness of his fame, we are
able to study not only his genius, but in a measure himself also; for though it
is not safe, as a rule, to divine the nature of an artist from his works, we
cannot be wrong in ascribing a width of sympathy, a confident reliance on his
great gifts, and reverence for those of others, an original outlook upon the
worlds both of nature and Art, a capacity to feel deeply and distinguish in the
collection of the widow of James Rothschild, in Paris, and a St. Jerome in the
Lichtenstein Gallery at Vienna; but if we except the picture now in the
Hermitage of St. Petersburg, and formerly in the Cathedral of St. Donatian at
Bniges, which represents the Virgin and Child on the crescent hovering in
heavenly glory, attended by angels playing upon instruments, with God the Father
and the Holy Ghost above, and below a group worshipping, composed of King David,
the Roman Emperor Augustus, two prophets, and two sibyls, he left nothing to
compare in importance with the two great altar-pieces
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