Attributed to Quinten Massys the Elder and Workshop

Private collection, Spain;

Anonymous sale, Madrid, Duran, 27 September 2018, lot 72 (as Flemish School, 19^th century);

Where acquired by the present collector. 

This recently rediscovered Lamentation is an extraordinarily compelling rendition of a composition renowned throughout sixteenth-century Antwerp. Numerous versions of this image exist, and they are all believed to originate from a lost original by Quinten Massys, the founder of the Antwerp School. None, however, approaches the quality, finesse, and completion of the present work. Painted with exacting detail and imbued with a profound degree of gravitas and monumentality, this picture stands as the finest known example of its kind. So closely does it align with the master’s hand that Dr Larry Silver, to whom we are grateful, has proposed this may be the lost original datable to the very final years of Massys’s career.

In this painting, a sorrowful Mary tenderly cradles the lifeless body of her Son. Their intertwined, pyramidal figures fill the foreground of the scene, bringing a palpable sense of immediacy to the image. Mary’s voluminously draped figure supports the thin, gaunt frame of Christ, the graceful folds of her white veil complementing the delicate features of her round face. The warmth of her flushed cheeks and rosy lips offset the haunting pallor of Christ, a powerful contrast that further amplifies the poignancy of this intimate moment. As tears fill her eyes and run down her cheeks, Mary places one last kiss on the lips of Christ.

Above looms the rocky outcrop of Calvary, with the three crosses of the crucifixion silhouetted against the sky. To the right, Joseph of Arimathea, shown in profile with outstretched arms, prepares the tomb for Christ’s burial. Two gentlemen in conversation meander along a path near the left edge, and a highly detailed walled cityscape of Jerusalem rises in the middle distance, beyond which a rolling landscape gently recedes into the deep horizon to a point, blending seamlessly with the blue sky above. A finely painted gilt border frames the scene, lending an exquisite finish to the scene.

Quinten Massys was a remarkably innovative artist who built a successful career in early sixteenth-century Antwerp, a city then experiencing a surge of economic and artistic growth. The father of an artistic dynasty of his own, Massys was born in Louvain in about 1465–66. He joined the Antwerp’s Guild of Saint Luke in 1491, and by 1495, he had welcomed his first apprentices into his workshop.¹ Although details of his early training are unknown, his œuvre demonstrates a keen awareness and response to works of other artists. He drew inspiration not only from Northern painters like Rogier van der Weyden, Louvain-based Dieric Bouts, Hans Memling, and Gerard David, but also from Italian masters, most notably Leonardo da Vinci, although the exact nature of his Southern European connections are still debated.

As Massys’s career progressed, his increasingly devout religiosity found echoes in his artistic output, particularly in the last decade of his career. He spent the very end of his life at a Carthusian monastery in Kiel, where he died in 1530. His legacy was continued through his sons, Cornelis and Jan Massys, both of whom registered as masters in Antwerp’s guild. Jan, who closely emulated his father’s style, may have taken over the flourishing family workshop, ensuring the continuation of Massys’s artistic influence well into the next generation. 

In the early decades of the sixteenth century, Quinten Massys returned to the theme of The Lamentation on several occasions. One of the earliest examples is the central panel for the St John Altarpiece (fig. 1),² commissioned in 1508 by the chapter of Antwerp’s joiner’s guild for the Antwerp Cathedral and completed in 1511. That painting reveals Massys’s awareness of Rogier van der Weyden’s renowned Descent from the Cross, an altarpiece he likely would have encountered as a young man in Louvain. Massys’s more restrained Lamentation of about 1514³ shares some compositional affinities with works of a similar subject by Dieric Bouts, particularly in the full-length rendering of the Christ’s stiff, full-length figure resting in the lap of his mother. As Massys’s career progressed, his treatments of the subject were suffused with less majesty and more humanity, so as to invoke greater piety and emotion from the viewer. This evolution is exemplified in the present composition, which bears notable visual parallels to a panel from the workshop of Gerard David that is today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.⁴

Like many of Massys's late-career devotional works, this Lamentation exists in multiple variants, most of which depict only the central figures at half-length, omitting the detailed cityscape on the left. These versions largely differ by way of quality and narrative detail, but none matches the scale, level of execution, or the comprehensiveness of the present work.⁵ Among the notable variants are a copy attributed to Massys’s workshop, formerly in the collection of Charles d’Arenberg and now housed in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, as well as another in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Antwerp (fig. 2).⁶ Several additional examples are today in Spanish collections,⁷ suggesting that Massys’s original may have been in that region very early in its lifetime. Such a detail should not be surprising, for Massys’s reputation stretched far outside the Netherlands, and several of his works were exported to the Iberian Peninsula.

Even after his death, Massys’s influence remained strong, and one of the most captivating records of the popularity of the present composition is found in Willem Key’s panel of the same subject from about 1553 in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich (fig. 3). Key’s painting clearly drew inspiration from Massys’s lost original, making only subtle alterations, such as reversing the composition’s orientation and rendering Christ with a more classical torso. This enduring popularity highlights the significant impact of Massys’s Lamentation, both during his lifetime and in the decades that followed.

From the thin strokes of hair emerging at the edge of the beautiful folds of the Virgin’s veil, to the highly detailed landscape and cityscape, and to the subtle modeling of the flesh tones of his figures, several compositional details throughout the present painting can be linked to Massys’s output and style. The same two men walking along the uneven path at left, for instance, appear in Massys’s Crucifixion of circa 1515 in the National Gallery of Canada.⁸ The Virgin’s rounded face, thin nose, and partially closed downcast eyes find parallels in the artist’s 1529 Rattier Madonna^,9 but perhaps even more so in the tear-filled sorrowful visage of his Grieving Magdalene of about 1526 (fig. 4).

Several instances of Massys painting in glue tempera on fine linen (also known as tüchlein) are known. This painting was executed in oil on a very thinly woven canvas. The oil on canvas technique was already in use by Italian artists like Titian during Massys’s lifetime,¹⁰ and although it would become a more common medium and support for Northern artists in the seventeenth century, several early examples are known by Netherlandish hands. In addition to Lancelot Blondeel’s 1523 canvas of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Sint Jakobskerk in Bruges, his 1545 canvas of St. Luke Drawing the Virgin in the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, and Joachim Bueckelaer’s slightly later Four Elements in the National Gallery in London, among others, perhaps the earliest and most well-known is Gerard David’s large Deposition (fig. 5), painted in about 1495–1500 and today in the Frick Collection, New York. Considering his creative spirit and his aforementioned awareness of artistic practices prevalent in both the North and the South, such a novel degree of innovation in medium choice would not be surprising for Massys, particularly at the end of his career. Of additional note, like the present work, the Frick canvas also has a painted border, a detail which is found in traces at the edges of Massys’s tüchlein of a Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine and Barbara in the National Gallery, London.¹¹ As many canvases of the period were made for export, such borders may have sometimes served as a decorative element or as a guide for restretching once the work reached its destination.¹²

We are grateful to several art historians for kindly sharing their opinions on this painting’s attribution, including Dr Larry Silver, Till-Holger Borchert, Peter van den Brink, Maryan Ainsworth, and Prof. Dr Maximiliaan Martens, among others. Larry Silver, who has examined the work first-hand and has assisted in the cataloguing of this lot, accepts this painting as a late work by Quinten Massys. From high resolution images, Till-Holger Borchert believes it was produced by Quinten Massys with assistance from his workshop, and Peter van den Brink considers it a high-quality example from the artist’s workshop. Maryan Ainsworth and Maximiliaan Martens, both of whom have examined the work first-hand, situate the canvas in the direct following of the artist.

¹ His apprentices at this early period of his career included Ariaen (?van Overbeke), Willem Muelenbroec, Eduart Portugalois, and Hennen Boeckmakere.

² Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, inv. nos 245–49. For a full discussion on this altarpiece, see L. Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys with Catalogue Raisonné, Montclair 1984, pp. 204–5, no. 11, the centre reproduced pl. 20.

³ Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 2203.

⁴ See, for example, a small panel from the workshop of Gerard David in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, inv. no. 54, oil on panel, 19.8 x 18.3 cm.

⁵ A copy of the present composition by an anonymous artist in the circle of Massys recently appeared on the market in February 2020: anonymous sale, Philadelphia, Freeman’s, 18 February 2020, lot 4 (as circle of Quinten Massys the Elder).

⁶ Silver 1984, p. 229, nos 47 A 1 and 47 B 1 respectively.

⁷ For example, one recorded in the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, Madrid (Silver 1984, no. 47 A 2) and another in the Cathedral in Seville.

⁸ Oil on oak panel, 51 x 36.5 cm, inv. no. 6190.

⁹ Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 20. Silver 1984, pp. 229–30, no. 48, reproduced pl. 68.

¹⁰ For example, see three paintings by Titian at the National Gallery, London: Bacchus and Ariadne of circa 1520-23 (NG 35), Portrait of Girolamo Fracastoro of circa 1528 (NG 3949) and his Boy with a Bird datable to the late 1520s (NG 933).

¹¹ National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG3664, glue tempera on linen, 93.5 x 110.3 cm.

¹² Painted borders are somewhat common on tüchleins, such as on Dieric Bouts’ Entombment in the National Gallery, London (inv. no. NG664).