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Whatever might have been his source of inspiration, Quintin Matsys was an apt scholar. His 'Descent from the Cross, now in the Museum, Antwerp, was the 'Descent from the Cross, and the picture in the Cathedral, until superseded by Rubens' masterpiece on the same subject. Still Quintin Matsys version remains, and is in some respects an unsurpassed picture.
A similar interest in humanity as such, in the individual apart from the type, is noticeable in the pictures of the Van Eycks, of Memling, of Quentin Matsys, and Roger Van der Weyden, wherein all idea of beauty, of composition, of universal appeal is subordinated as it is in no other art in that of Holland no more than in that of Italy to the representation in the most definite, precise, and powerful way of some intensely human personality.
It is the handiwork of Quentin Matsys." "I don't know him." "He was a blacksmith until he was twenty years old, when he fell in love with the fair daughter of a painter. The story goes that the father would not permit his daughter to marry any man that was not an artist, and the blacksmith abandoned his anvil for the easel. He had a genius for art, and soon painted better than his masters.
There is a traditional grouping of this Divine tragedy, and Quintin Matsys has followed the tradition. The body of the Lord is supported by two venerable old men Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus while the holy women anoint the wounds of the Saviour; the Virgin swooning with grief is supported by St John. The figures are full of individuality, and their action is instinct with pathos.
The Quentin Matsys pictures are strong; among others the portrait of Peter Gillis with his shrewd, strongly marked physiognomy. This is a Matsys town. Every one looks at his old iron well beside the Cathedral and recalls the legend of the blacksmith, as every boy remembers here Hendrik Conscience and the Lion of Flanders.
And he went on to recall a bygone moment in the Brussels Gallery, when, as he was standing before the great Quintin Matsys, he was accosted with sudden careless familiarity by a thin, shabbily dressed man, in whose dark distinction, made still more fantastic and conspicuous by the fever and the emaciation of consumption, he recognized at once Marriott Dalrymple.
The vitality of the legend is indicated by the inscription on a tablet to the memory of Quintin Matsys in the Cathedral, Antwerp. The Latin inscription reads thus in English: 'Twas love connubial taught the smith to paint, Quintin Matsys lived and died a respected burgher of Antwerp, a member of the great Antwerp painters' guild of St Luke. He was twice married, and had thirteen children.
Turn to his other pictures; those, for instance, in which he strove to depict Christ's Passion; we are not looking at the stormy scene represented by Matsys or Grünewald; he has none of their harsh manliness, nor their gloomy energy, nor their tragic turbulence; he only weeps with the uncomforted grief of a woman.
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