Massys, Quinten Lot n° 4

Quinten Massys 1465/66 Leuven - 1530 Antwerp Mary in Prayer Oil on panel. 44 x 33.5 cm. Provenance With P. De Boer, Amsterdam; Anonymous sale, Lempertz, Cologne, 20-22 November 1975, lot 117; H. Becker, Dortmund; Hans M. Cramer, The Hague, 1977. Literature Andrée de Bosque: Quinten Metsys, Brussels 1975, p. 252-53, no. 316, reproduced p. 251 and p. 390; Hans M. Cramer, Addendum 3, The Hague 1977, no. 107, reproduced; Larry Silver: The Paintings of Quinten Massys with Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford 1984, p. 230, under no. 49; Petra Müller, in: Ekkehard Mai (ed.): Das Kabinett des Sammlers, Cologne 1993, pp. 28-9, no. 12, reproduced. The small panel shows a portrait of the Virgin Mary with hands folded, in front of a dark background. The delicate esh 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