Lot 4 Dα

The small panel shows a portrait of the Virgin Mary with hands folded, in front of a dark background. The delicate flesh tones of her face and hands, the white of the scarf wrapped around her head and tied at her neck are masterfully executed. This same display of skilled handling
is also found in the radiant blue of her coat with gold embroidery
and sleeves. The panel is an excellent work of the transitional period between late gothic and Renaissance art of the Netherlands in the early 16th century.
In her 1975 monograph on Quinten Massys, Andrée de Bosque recognised the formal and iconographic connection of the picture with a wing of a diptych by this painter in the Museo Nacional del Prado
(ill. 1). The Prado painting shows the same cropped detail of an almost identical representation of the Virgin but viewed from the other side. From this it can be concluded that there would have been a Christ Blessing as counterpart for our picture. Another pair of paintings by Quinten Massys with the same motif, but dated earlier, can be found in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerp.
De Bosque has possibly seen our picture in the original. She describes it in detail in her book and summarises her judgement as follows:
“La Vierge de la collection allemande est d’une qualité supérieure à celle du Prado et se rapproche, bien qu’elle soit d’un style archaisant, de la Vierge du Louvre de 1529”. While she believes to recognise the hand also of his student and son, Jan Massys, in the Madrid diptych – originally from the personal collection of King Philipp II of Spain – she sees our painting as a work by the father himself. Ekkehard Mai and his associate Petra Müller concurred with this judgement in 1993 (op. cit.) and adopted the attribution to Quinten Massys. Larry Silver, on the other hand, did not initially reference our painting in his 1984 monography about Quinten Massys in any detail, mentioning it only in connection with the Madrid diptych – which he believes to be by Quinten – as a copy. However, having viewed a recent high-resolution photograph, Larry Silver now confirms the attribution to the Antwerp painter and even describes the picture as “a major work by Massys”, which he dates to the late 1520s.
The many devotional pictures which this important Antwerp master executed, in addition to large altar pictures, are depictions of saints and the Madonna in particular. These pictures were produced in small format for bourgeois clients for personal devotion. The Madonna was worshiped as mediator according to her theological role as intercessor between those praying and the Son of God. Massys turned to this subject particularly often in the last decade before his death which also fits Larry Silver’s dating of our devotional picture to within the artist’s late work.