Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Quinten Metsys (Quentin Metsys)
Netherlandish; 16th-century
Antwerp, Belgium: Museum Mayer van den Bergh
83%
Christ on the Cross with Donors. c1500-1520. Oil on 3 panels
Though these seven figures clearly exist in an elaborated perspectival space, there's still something slightly frontal and enclosed and oddly "iconic" about them, which both makes this altarpiece interesting and holds it back from utter greatness. Other paintings from the period — including other Metsys pictures — show the cross with slight dimension, but here (apart from a bit of the underside of the patibulum showing) it's perfectly fixed and forward, like it's sculpted. In fact, the most striking thing about this painting is the complex Christ-Magdalen form at center, which makes good on the cross's stiffness by counterposing to it the mournful sweep of Mary's cloaks and the bend of her wretched body. The other figures, however, are all either a bit too still or a bit too lively (the patrons on the one hand, Joseph on the other). Gone is the stately, infinite quality of the impossible inventions of the 15th century, but the various extravagances and reductions of the 17th have not yet arrived. (TFS, 2026)