Matsys

Matsys, or MASSYS, QUENTIN, Flemish painter, born at Louvain about 1466, was originally, according to a legend long current, a blacksmith who turned artist. However the connection be explained, it is certain that he settled in Antwerp in 1491, and was in that year admitted a member of the painters' guild of St Luke, and died in that city in 1530 or 1531. He forms a connecting link between the school of the Van Eycks and the later realistic Dutch school. His pictures are mostly religious, treated with a reverent spirit, but with decided touches of realism, and are remarkable for their glow of colour, their absence of light and shade, and their exquisite finish, especially in minor details. An altarpiece representing the Virgin and Child, painted for the cathedral of Louvain; another for the cathedral of Antwerp, the 'Burial of Christ,' flanked by the 'Martyrdom of John the Baptist' and the 'Martyrdom of John the Evangelist;' and two other examples of the Virgin and Child are his best religious pictures. Such genre-pieces as 'The Money-changers,' 'The Gaoler,' and others exhibit his realistic tendencies. Matsys also takes high rank as a portrait-painter; excellent specimens of his skill in this department are the portraits of Petrus Ægidius and of Maximilian of Austria. He seems to have been acquainted with Lucas van Leyden, Holbein, Dürer, Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, and other notable contemporaries.