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BERNARD VAN ORLEY, born at Brussels in 1471, is characterised in the catalogue of the National Gallery as "taking his place after Massys and Mabuse on the downward slope of Netherlandish painting." He has been immortalised by the fine portrait head of him by Albert Dürer which is now in the Dresden Gallery. He was Court painter to Margaret of Austria, Governess of the Low Countries, and retained the same post under her successor, Mary of Hungary. He is said to have visited Rome in 1509, and there made the acquaintance of Raphael, whose influence is certainly apparent, though hardly his inspiration, in the Holy Family in the Louvre. A more Netherlandish work, both in feeling and in treatment, is the Piet
Towards the end of the fifteenth century, in consequence of the transfer of commerce from Bruges to Antwerp, this latter city first became and long continued the centre of art, and especially of Netherlandish painting. Here it is that we find QUENTIN MASSYS, the greatest Belgian painter of this later time. He was born probably in 1466.
This is manifest in some of the illustrations in Part I., as the Enthroned Madonna, by Quentin Massys, where the mother kisses her child, and Angelico's Madonna in Glory, where she holds him to her cheek. Gathering our examples from so many methods of composition, we are in the midst of a multitude of pictures which no man can number, and which set forth every conceivable phase of motherliness.
A number of pictures representing sacred subjects exhibit, with little feeling for real beauty of form, such delicacy of features, beauty and earnestness of feeling, tenderness and clearness of colouring and skill in finish, as worthily recall the religious painting of the Middle Ages, though at the very end of them. In his draperies, especially, we observe a charm which is peculiar to Massys.
Then the Van Eycks, Hubert and Jan, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling, Quentin Massys, Lucas van Leyden, the two Hans Holbein, elder and younger, Burgkmair, Wolgemut, and then, master of them all, Albrecht Dürer.
First among these was his son, JAN MASSYS, born about 1500, who followed closely but rather clumsily in his father's footsteps, and need only be mentioned for carrying on the tradition. More interesting were the Breughels, namely, PIETER BREUGHEL the elder, born about 1520, called Peasant Breughel, and his two sons Pieter and Jan.
In a large number appeared valuable paintings from the pencil of the most celebrated masters of Netherlands. The eye rested on the creations of the immortal brothers Van Eyck, the touching Quintin Massys, the intellectual Roger Van der Weydens, the spiritual Jerome Bosch, the laborious Lucas de Leyde, and others whose names were favorably mentioned in the world of art.
The decided and strongly realistic style in which Quentin Massys had painted scenes from common life, as for instance the Misere or Money Changers, became the model for various painters in their treatment of similar subjects.
In Germany the taste for the fantastic in art peculiar to the Middle Ages, though it engendered clever and spirited works such as those of Quentin Massys and Lucas van Leyden, was still unfavourable to the cultivation of pure beauty, scenes from the Apocalypse, Dances of Death, etc., being among the favourite subjects for art.
This is placed over the Virgin's brow just at the edge of the hair, which is otherwise unconfined. In the enthroned Madonna by Quentin Massys, in the Berlin Gallery, we have many typical characteristics of Northern art. The throne itself is exceedingly rich, ornamented with agate pillars with embossed capitals of gold.
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