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The High Renaissance
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Mannerism
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(Renaissance
Art Map)
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See collection:
Quentin Massys
see also collection:
Quentin Massys
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Quentin Massys
born c. 1465, /66, Louvain, Brabant [now in Belgium]
died 1530, Antwerp
Massys also spelled Matsys, Metsys, or Messys Flemish artist, the first
important painter of the Antwerp school.
Trained as a blacksmith in his native Louvain, Massys is said to have studied
painting after falling in love with an artist's daughter. In 1491 he went to
Antwerp and was admitted in to the painters' guild.
Among Massys' early works are two pictures of the Virgin and Child. His most
celebrated paintings are two large triptych altarpieces, “The Holy Kinship,” or
“St. Anne Altarpiece,” ordered for the Church of Saint-Pieter in Louvain
(1507–09), and “The Entombment of the Lord” (c. 1508–11), both of which exhibit
strong religious feeling and precision of detail. His tendency to accentuate
individual expression is demonstrated in such pictures as “The Old Man and the
Courtesan” and “The Money Changer and His Wife” (see photograph). “Christus
Salvator Mundi” and “The Virgin in Prayer” display serene dignity. Pictures with
figures on a smaller scale are a polyptych, the scattered parts of which have
been reassembled, and a later “Virgin and Child.” His landscape backgrounds are
in the style of one of his contemporaries, the Flemish artist Joachim
Patinir; the landscape depicted in Massys' “The Crucifixion” is believed to be
the work of Patinir. Massys painted many notable portraits, including one of his
friend Erasmus.
Although his portraiture is more subjective and personal than that of Albrecht
Durer or Hans Holbein, Massys' painting may have been influenced by both German
masters. Massys' lost “St. Jerome in His Study,” of which a copy survives in
Vienna, is indebted to Dürer's “St. Jerome,” now in Lisbon. Some Italian
influence may also be detected, as in “Virgin and Child” (Nationalmuseum, Poznań,
Pol.), in which the figures are obviously copied from Leonardo da Vinci's
“Virgin of the Rocks” (Louvre).
Massys' two sons were artists. Jan (1509–75), who became a master in the guild of
Antwerp in 1531, was banished in 1543 for his heretical opinions, spent 15 years
in Italy or France, and returned to Antwerp in 1558. His early pictures were
imitations of his father's work, but a half-length “Judith with the Head of
Holofernes” of a later date, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, shows
Italian or French influence, as does “Lot and His Daughters” (1563;
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Cornelis Massys (1513–79), Quentin's second
son, became a master painter in 1531, painting landscapes in his father's style
and also executing engravings.
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Quentin Massys
Old Woman (The Queen of Tunis)
(Norbert Schneider)
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 Massys
Portrait of an Old Man
1517
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Although there was rationalism in the
impulse to produce empirically correct representations of external
reality, the portrait was still imbued with talismanic properties in
the minds of most spectators. The likeness had a magical ability to
"act" vicariously, as a kind of proxy for the absent person.
A new art form, the caricature, which first appeared in the early
sixteenth century - long before the brothers Agostino and Annibale
Carracci, the artists who are said to have invented it - clearly
shows that the visual distortion of the human likeness, especially
the face, was used as a means of vicariously satisfying the need to
express hatred or aggression towards certain persons. Thus the
objects of hatred were scorned and ridiculed by disfiguring their
"effigies". In 1956, Werner Hofmann showed that new norms of beauty
and bodily proportion must already have evolved for distortions of
this kind - the distension or shrinking of ears, nose, mouth or
forehead, for example - to be considered at all funny. Particular
ideals of beauty became socially acceptable, making it possible to
discriminate against deviants on the grounds that their conduct was
unconventional, or unnatural. This development had evidently reached
most of Europe by the last third of the fifteenth century. Its
parallel in literature was Grobianism, or the Rabelaisian style,
which amounted to a satirical attack on behaviour which did not
conform to social decencies and rules of courtly etiquette which had
filtered down from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie.
This painting — generally attributed to Quentin Massys or one of his
circle - of an old woman whose face appears to have
been deliberately distorted in the interests of grotesque humour,
makes full use of compositional techniques developed by
fifteenth-century Netherlandish and Italian portraitists. Wearing an
immense horned bonnet, and with a corset pressing together her
flabby breasts, the old woman sits with her left hand on a parapet
in front of her, while her right engages in some form of
gesticulation. But is this really a portrait, a painting purporting
to represent the likeness of a particular person? The painting is
based on a model which is now lost and which Leonardo may have used
in an early drawing (Windsor Castle, N° 12492). Giorgio Vasari
reports that Leonardo was moved by an insatiable desire to observe
unusual and deformed faces. His interest in these phenomena sprang
from his work on a canon of ideal bodilv proportions. The new
standards of beauty no longer allowed for natural irregularities in
a person's appearance, but disqualified these as infringements
against the social ideal. Despite their emphatic "semantics of
individuality" (Niklas Luhmann), Renaissance humanists criticised
the individual as ultimately defying classification, and therefore
social integration. Whenever beauty is linked to intelligence or
ethical integrity, anything that does not correspond to the
aesthetic ideal is viewed not only as ugly, but as an expression of
abject stupidity, or immorality.
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 Massys
Portrait of an Old Man (detail)
1517
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Van Eyck's ruthless registration of
the "unbeautiful" details of his sitter's appearance, which
was evidently quite acceptable to his patrons, shows that
the idea of ugliness as an aesthetic category had not
entered contemporary thinking on art or everyday life by the
early fifteenth century. Massys, on the other hand, painted
his Old Woman by engaging in systematic deviation
from the norm. The method that he evolved had much in common
with the experiments in deformation to be found in Durer's
sketchbooks on proportion. Moreover, the old woman's costume
would also have amused Massys's contemporaries, since they
would have found it quite old-fashioned. Her bonnet, a "hennin"
as it was called, "was worn in, or shortly before, 1450, as
can be seen from Jan van Eyck's portrait of his wife
Margaret in 1439 (Bruges). The artist's satirical attention
to the woman's age would also have ridiculed her in the eyes
of his contemporanes, who had begun to think of age as
something ugly, and youth as a positive quality, as revealed
by paintings which show different human ages, or the
portraits of "unequal lovers".
Leonardo's and Massys's grotesque studies of human
disproportions created a precedent which could - without a
second thought for the problems of mimesis or verisimilitude
- be used, or abused, in all kinds of satire. Graphic
reproductions of these works have reappeared under various
guises ever since: in Wenzel Hollar's King and Queen of
Tunis, for example, or as the likeness of "Countess Margaret
of Tirol" (died 1369). Massys's painting was even passed off
in the seventeenth century as a portrait of Pope Pius VI's
sister, Princess Porcia, who was supposed to have attempted
to rescue religion with an army of Jesuits (Paris,
Bibliotheque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes).
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Leonardo da Vinci
Grotesque Heads
(details)
1494
Leonardo's caricatures were a side
product of studies he undertook to establish ideal human
proportions. They also illustrate the precept of diversity
("varieta"), which he had outlined in his treatise on
painting. Here, Leonardo was referring to the great variety
of natural forms, to which the creative artist was capable
of adding by inventing new ones.
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See collection:
Quentin Massys
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Money Makes the World Go Round
Trade and coins in early modern times
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When the little "moutons d'or" were devalued to twelve "sous parisis",
there was no bread, no wine nor anything else. The money changers
refused to pay a decent rate of exchange. And people hoarded their
money although it was worth nothing. Many simply tossed their coins
right over the money changers' shops into the river.
From the diary of an anonymous Parisian, 1427
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Massys
The Moneylender and his Wife
1514
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 The Money Lenders, after Massys by Jan Ravestyn
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The term "trade" was first used in
the modern sense in ancient Egypt. From the fourth
millennium BC, the land of the Pharaohs maintained trade
links with other civilisations. These commercial ties
consisted primarily of the bartering of goods, such as raw
materials, hides, tools, even the bright-coloured feathers
of exotic birds, valuable shells and, of course, precious
stones. The Persians were the ones to invent the mintage of
coins. The bartering of goods gradually yielded to payment
in currency, although the heyday of the coin did not arise
until the Middle Ages, when importing goods became of
primary importance. Suddenly Venetian, Genoese and Pisan
ships were sailing across the Mediterranean to meet caravans
bringing silk overland from China or spices from India. On
returning to their home ports, the Italian manners sold
their valuable cargoes to merchants. In the Holy Roman
Empire, for instance, powerful mercantile enterprises sprang
up everywhere. The Hanseatic League controlled trade to and
from the North Sea and the Baltic coasts.
Once the era of overseas discovery and exploration was well
underway, trade became a global matter. At that time, paper
money (a Chinese invention) was used in Europe merely as a
receipt for monies tendered, and the material value of coins
still corresponded to their nominal value. Yet money looked
different depending on where one went. Only money changers
were able to determine the value of a coin by looking at it
through a magnifying glass and by placing it on the scales
to find out its exact gold or silver content. For this
reason money changers were an indispensable part of life in
the great trade centres and market towns. Even the man in
the street required their services. Without the money
changers a soldier who wanted a tankard of beer in the town
where he was garrisoned would have had to drink water if he
had carned only the currency of his native city. Flemish
painter Quentin Massys observed a money changer at work in
Antwerp. At that time the city was the main port of the Low
Countries, and bustled with economic activity. Money
changers enjoyed high status. Nevertheless, they were always
suspected of being stingy, avaricious and of charging
exorbitant interest. Perhaps the wife of the money changer
depicted is contemplating a prayer book in the pious hope
that she and her husband will not be led into temptation by
the lure of riches....
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Massys
The Moneylender and his Wife (detail)
1514
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See collection:
Quentin Massys
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