METSYS (MASSYS), QUENTIN. - Painter, b. in Louvain in 1466, d. in Antwerp in 1530. He is found in Antwerp in 1491, where in 1493 he enrolled in the painters' guild, remaining there until his death.
From his earliest works there appears that duality of medieval and Renaissance, of mystic and humanly realistic, that is typical of him. Already in the Virgin with the Child (Brussels Museum) he assimilates Leonardesque principles in composition and in sfumato, showing himself at the same time a delicate colorist. But predominant is the tradition of the early Quattrocento, which also characterizes his other Madonnas (Berlin, London, Antwerp, etc.).
Fundamental for Flemish art in general is the great Retable with stories of St. Anne (Brussels Museum) of 1509, in which one admires a broad coordination of movements and images, and a color that with delicate transitions gives new vibrations of forms and lights. The realistic tendency, represented above all in the altarpiece for the Carpenters' Guild (Antwerp cathedral, now in the Museum [1508-11]), later issues into true genre paintings (The Banker and His Wife, 1514, in the Louvre; the Amor disegnale, Portualès collection, Paris, etc.), into caricatures, as in the Monstrous Woman of the Hugh Blaker collection (London), or into portraits, very numerous (among which are famous those of Erasmus and Thomas More) in which, perhaps through influences of Italian culture, the softness of the transitions of chiaroscuro and tone leads to the almost magical idealization of natural data. He also influenced Josse van Cleve, the Master of the Magdalene Manai, the Master of the Morisson Triptych, Gérard David himself, Goossen van der Weyden, and from him started the landscape painter Joachim Patinir, who collaborated with him in the Temptation of St. Anthony (Prado).