Object data
oil on panel
support: height 39 cm × width 27.1 cm
Quinten Massijs (I) (copy after)
Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus (1469 ?-1536)
after c. 1535
Technical notes
The support is a vertically grained oak plank, 0.6-0.8 cm thick. The reverse shows traces of a crosscut saw and is bevelled on the right, top and bottom, which leads to the assumption that the panel has been only slightly reduced in size. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1510. The panel could have been ready for use by 1521, but a date in or after 1535 is more likely. The white ground visible along the sides extends up to the edges of the panel, and even over the edge on the right side. Underdrawing is not visible to the naked eye nor with infrared reflectography. The figure was left in reserve and the contour of the hat was slightly altered. The paint was applied rather thinly.
Scientific examination and reports
- infrared reflectography: M. Wolters / M. Leeflang [2], RKD/RMA, no. RKDG442, 12 February 2007
- condition report: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 12 February 2007
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 15 March 2007
Condition
Fair. The paint layer is abraded and there is locally lifting paint, which is stable, but disturbing in the thinly painted background. The thick varnish is strongly discoloured and rather matte.
Provenance
…; from H.C. van Molman, fl. 573, as Hans Holbein, to the museum, 6 July 1803;1 on loan to the Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, since December 1978
Object number: SK-A-166
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Quinten Massijs (Louvain 1466 - Antwerp 1530), copy after
Quinten Massijs was born in Louvain between 4 April and 10 September 1466 as the son of a smith, Joost Massijs, and his wife Catherina van Kincken. His apprenticeship is not documented, but he probably trained as a painter in his native Louvain, possibly in the workshop of Aelbert Bouts, whose influence is evident in his work. Massijs then moved to Antwerp, where he is first recorded as a master in the ledgers of the Guild of St Luke in 1491. He was married twice, first to Alyt Tuylt in Louvain in 1492, and after her death in 1507 to Catherine Heyns in Antwerp in 1508. He and Catherine owned two houses in the city. He died between 13 July and 16 September 1530, at which time he was staying in a Carthusian monastery in Kiel, on the outskirts of Antwerp.
There are four pupils of Quinten Massijs documented between 1495 and 1510: Adriaen (1495), Willem Muelenbroec (1501), Eduart Portugalois (1504) and Hennen Boeckmakere (1510). No further pupils are mentioned, probably because the two sons of his second marriage, Cornelis and Jan, were apprentices and later assistants in his workshop. This supposition is bolstered by the fact that in 1531, shortly after their father’s death, both of them enrolled as masters in the Antwerp guild.
Massijs’s reconstructed oeuvre consists of some 60 paintings, 6 of which are signed and dated. He mainly painted religious works, both large and small, as well as secular subjects and portraits. He executed his first major commission between 1507 and 1509: the St Anne Altarpiece for the chapel of the St Anne fraternity in the St Pieterskerk in Louvain.2 Before it was finished he accepted another assignment to paint the St John Altarpiece for the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk in Antwerp.3 Massijs also received several commissions from Portugal. Between 1509 and 1513, for instance, he painted a Retable of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows for the Madre de Deus Convent at Xabregas, near Lisbon.4
Massijs worked in the Flemish tradition, particularly at the beginning of his career, when his paintings show the influence of important predecessors like Dieric and Aelbert Bouts, Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. He later incorporated Italian elements that he encountered in Antwerp. Among other things, he was clearly inspired by the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, although there is no indication that he ever went to Italy himself.
Massijs was a friend of Joachim Patinir, as evidenced by the fact that after the latter’s death in 1524 he was appointed guardian of his daughters, along with the painters Karel Alaerts and Jan Buyst. One of the paintings on which Massijs and Patinir collaborated was the Landscape with the Temptation of St Antony in Madrid.5
References
Van Mander 1604, fols. 215-16; Fickaert 1648; Van Fornenbergh 1658; Van Even 1846; De Bosschere 1907; Friedländer VII, 1929, pp. 15-78; Friedländer in Thieme/Becker XXIV, 1930, pp. 227-28; Boon 1942; ENP VII, 1971, pp. 12-40; De Bosque 1975; Silver 1984; Miedema III, 1996, pp. 37-47; Campbell-Hutchison in Turner 1996, XXI, pp. 352-57
(Vanessa Hoogland)
Entry
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the leading and most influential scholars of his day.6 This half-length portrait is a copy of the one that Quinten Massijs painted in 1517 as the companion piece to a portrait of Pieter Gillis (1486-1533), a judge and the city secretary of Antwerp.7 Letters from Thomas More to Erasmus and Gillis show that both portraits were commissioned by the sitters in May 1517 and were delivered to More in Calais at the beginning of September, shortly before he left for England.8 More thanked his friends for them, and showed his approval of Matthijs by comparing him to Apelles.9 On the evidence of the provenance and the painting technique it is assumed that the portrait of Erasmus in Hampton Court (fig. a) and the one of Peter Gillis in a private English collection are the originals by Massijs.10 There are three known copies of Erasmus’s portrait, including this one.11
In 1519, two years after he had painted his portrait, Massijs made a design for a bronze medal with the humanist’s profile (fig. b).12 This, in addition to More’s praise of the artist, appears to show that Erasmus also held him in high regard. Erasmus was also portrayed once by Albrecht Dürer and twice by Hans Holbein, but at a later date than Massijs’s painting and medal. It is not known how much Massijs’s painted portrait influenced Dürer and Holbein.13
The most striking difference between the Amsterdam painting and the other two surviving copies is that the former lacks the bookshelves. It is also smaller. Both factors, backed by the rather coarse brushwork, seem to indicate that this is a simplified copy. The absence of the bookshelves, which served as a binding element in the original portrait pair, also makes one suspect that this panel was painted as an independent portrait and had no companion piece.
On the evidence of the painting technique, which lacks Massijs’s distinctive subtle structuring of the face with thin layers of glaze and the addition of details with a delicate brush, it is clear that the Amsterdam panel is not by the master himself. The dendrochronology, which shows that the painting was probably executed after around 1535, indicates that the copy was made after Massijs’s death in 1530.
(Micha Leeflang)
Literature
Moes I, 1897, p. 280, no. 2385:52; Friedländer VII, 1929, p. 120, no. 36a; Van Hall 1963, p. 94, no. 612:6; Brunin 1968, p. 146; ENP VII, 1971, pp. 23, 64, no. 36a; Silver 1984, pp. 235-36, no. 58; coll. cat. Utrecht 2002, pp. 58-59; Hand in Washington 2006, pp. 116-21, no. 16
Collection catalogues
1809, p. 34, no. 135 (as Hans Holbein); 1843, p. 29, no. 132 (as Hans Holbein; ‘in good condition’); 1853, p. 34, no. 359 (as Hans Holbein; fl. 800); 1858, p. 65, no. 134 (as Hans Holbein); 1880, pp. 439-40, no. 520 (as attributed to Hans Holbein); 1887, p. 108, no. 903; 1903, p. 169, no. 1530; 1934, p. 180, no. 1530; 1976, p. 370, no. A 166
Citation
M. Leeflang, 2010, 'copy after Quinten (I) Massijs, Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus (1469 ?-1536), after c. 1535', in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6693
(accessed 13 November 2024 06:00:37).Figures