This recently rediscovered Lamentation is an exceptionally powerful rendering of a composition renowned throughout Antwerp during the sixteenth century. The many versions known of this image are thought to take as their precedent a lost original by Quinten Massys, the founder of the Antwerp School, but none rivals the quality, finesse, and completion of the present work. Painted with exacting detail and imbued with undeniable gravitas and monumentality, this picture is the strongest known example of its type. It comes so remarkably close to the hand of the master that Dr. Larry Silver, to whom we are grateful, has proposed this may be the lost original datable to the very last years of the artist’s career.
In this painting, a sorrowful Mary tenderly embraces the lifeless body of her Son. Their 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 and gaunt frame of Christ, the beautiful folds of her white veil complementing the delicate features of her round face. Her warm skin, flushed cheeks and rosy lips offset the haunting pallor of Christ, a powerful contrast that further enhances 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 their heads appears the rocky outcropping of Calvary, atop which rise the three crosses of the crucifixion. To the right of their heads, Joseph of Arimathea, visible in profile with outstretched arms, prepares his own 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 appears in the middle distance, beyond which a rolling landscape gently recedes into the deep horizon to a point where it becomes one with the blue of the sky above. Adding a final degree of finish to the scene, a painted gilt border frames the composition.
Quinten Massys was a highly innovative artist who built a successful career in the early sixteenth century in Antwerp, which at that t.mes was a flourishing city booming with economic and artistic opportunity. The father of an artistic dynasty of his own, Massys was born in Louvain in about 1465–1466. In 1491, he was admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke in Antwerp, and as early as 1495, he welcomed his first apprentices to his workshop.1 Although details of his earliest artistic training are unknown, a keen awareness and response to works of other artists is reflected in his œuvre. This includes not only northern artists such as Rogier van der Weyden, Louvain-based Dieric Bouts, Hans Memling, and Gerard David, among others, but also Italian artists, most importantly, Leonardo da Vinci, although the exact origins of his connections to Southern Europe are uncertain. 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. Soon after, his two sons Cornelis and Jan Massys registered as masters in Antwerp’s guild, and the latter, who worked very closely in the style of his father, may indeed have taken over his thriving workshop.
Right: Fig. 2 Quentin Massys, Lamentation, oil on panel. Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. RF 817.
During the first few decades of the sixteenth century, Quinten Massys explored themes of the Lamentation on several occasions. One of the earliest instances is the central panel for the St. John Altarpiece (fig. 1)2 which was commissioned in 1508 for the Antwerp Cathedral by the chapter of the city’s joiner’s guild and completed in 1511. That painting betrays an awareness of Rogier van der Weyden’s famed Descent from the Cross, an altarpiece Massys would have encountered in Louvain as a young man. Massys’s more restrained Lamentation of about 1514 (fig. 2)3 shares some compositional affinities with works of a similar subject by Dieric Bouts, particularly in the full-length rendering of the stiff body of the deceased Christ resting on the lap of his mother. His later works were suffused with less majesty and more humanity, so as to inspire greater piety and emotion from the viewer, as wonderfully exemplified in the present composition, which shares some visual parallels with a panel from the workshop of Gerard David in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.4
Right: Fig. 4 Willem Key, Lamentation with Christ, oil on oak panel. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. 539.
Like other devotional images from Massys’s late career, this Lamentation is known in multiple variants, nearly all of which record only the central figures at half-length and omit the detailed cityscape at 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 Two variants include a copy ascribed to Massys’s workshop in the Royal Museum of Replica Handbags s in Brussels, but formerly in the collects ion of Charles d’Arenberg, and another copy in the Royal Museums of Replica Handbags s in Antwerp (fig. 3).6 Several other examples are today in Spanish collects ions,7 and that so many of these types have links to Spain suggests that Massys’s original may have been in that region very early in its lifet.mes . 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 reputation held 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. 4). Massys’s lost original certainly served as direct inspiration for Key, who changed the scene really only by reversing the orientation and presenting the dead Christ with a more classical torso.
From the thin strokes of hair emerging at the 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 Massy’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. 5).
Several instances of Massys painting in glue tempera on fine linen (also known as tüchlein) are known, but 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 lifet.mes ,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. 6), painted in about 1495–1500 and today in the Frick collects ion, 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 choice of medium 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 somet.mes s 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 firsthand 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 firsthand, situate the canvas in the direct following of the artist. We are also grateful to Maria Clelia Galassi for sharing her thoughts on the painting with us.
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 Replica Handbags s, 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. 204–205, cat. no. 11, the center reproduced plate 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, cat. nos 47 A 1 and 47 B 1 respectively.
7 For example, one recorded in the Lazaro-Galdiano collects ion, Madrid (Silver 1984, cat. no. 47 A 2) and another in the Cathedral in Seville.
8 Oil on oak panel, 51 by 36.5 cm, inv. no. 6190.
9 Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 20. Silver 1984, pp. 229–230, cat. no. 48, reproduced plate 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 by 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).