Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1465-1530 Quentin Massys, also spelled Matsys or Metsys, was born in Louvain, the son of a blacksmith. He is traditionally thought to have been trained in that craft by his father. Art in Louvain while Massys was growing up was dominated by Dirk Bouts. Massys became a member of the painters' guild in Antwerp in 1491 and died there in 1530. He represented a current of painting that flourished in Antwerp at this time of its sudden new prosperity. Erwin Panofsky (1953) described this trend, "archaism of around 1500," as "a prelude to, in fact a fact of, the Renaissance in Netherlandish painting," which prevailed in the southern Netherlands. The monumental Enthroned Madonna (Brussels), an early work by Massys, has features recalling both Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck. The central panel of Massys' imposing St. Anne Altarpiece, or the Holy Kinship (Brussels), which was commissioned for the church of St-Pierre in Louvain in 1507 and signed and dated 1509, has a prototype in the Holy Kinship of Geertgen tot Sint Jans. Even the physical types and costumes in Massys' version refer to Geertgen's. But Massys placed his rhythmically balanced figure groups in a domed, arcaded loggia that in architectural style appears to be reaching for a Renaissance vocabulary it cannot quite attain; certainly the architecture evokes a later period than that represented by the Gothic throne of the Enthroned Madonna. The calm and restraint of the St. Anne Altarpiece are replaced by heightened emotional expression in the next important painting by Massys that can be firmly dated, the Deposition triptych (Antwerp). This was commissioned in 1508 by the guild of joiners in Antwerp for their chapel in the Cathedral; Massys completed the composition in 1511. It was inspired by Rogier van der Weyden's great Deposition, which was in the church of St-Pierre in Louvain in Massys' time, and also quotes from Rogier's Entombment. Massys painted genre subjects, possibly with emblematic meaning, such as A Money Changer and His Wife, which belonged to a Netherlandish tradition that maintained its popularity right through the 17th century. In portraiture he made significant contributions. His pair of portraits of Erasmus and Petrus Aegidius, painted in 1517 for Sir Thomas More, set the pattern for representations of the scholar in his study.   Related Paintings of MASSYS, Quentin :. | St Anne Altarpiece sg | Ecce Homo | St Anne Altarpiece (right wing, detail) eh | St Anne Altarpiece (detail) rfg | St John Altarpiece (left wing) sg |
Related Artists:
Albin Henning
Illustrator,1886-1943
Henry Leonidas Rolfe
British,active 1847-81
Henrietta Rae
(30 December 1859 - 26 January 1928) was a prominent English painter of the later Victorian era. Born in Hammersmith, London, she was the youngest of seven children of a civil servant; her mother was musically talented, a former student of Felix Mendelssohn. An uncle, Charles Rae, was an artist and a student of George Cruikshank. Rae began studying art at age thirteen; she was educated at the Queen Square School of Art, Heatherley's School of Art (she was its first female pupil), and the British Museum. She reportedly had to apply to the Royal Academy schools at least five times before she was accepted though she eventually gained a seven-year scholarship. Her teachers there included Frank Bernard Dicksee, William Powell Frith, and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema; the last of these had the strongest influence on Rae's later work. She became a frequent exhibitor at the annual Royal Academy shows, beginning in 1881. She gained recognition and success early in her career, specializing in classical, allegorical, and literary subjects, often treated in a grand style and scale; her Psyche at the Throne of Venus (1894) measured 12 feet by 7 feet (305 by 193 cm) and contained 13 figures. Other paintings in the same classical vein include her Ariadne (1885), Eurydice (1886), Zephyrus and Flora (1888), Apollo and Daphne (1895), Diana and Calisto (1899), and Hylas and the Water Nymphs (1910) among many more.