14. Quentin Massys’ Ironwork, Antwerp - 9 Sept 1900 | Glass Plates
Although one of the most faded of the century-old glass plates, this photograph still evokes the striking silhouetted intricacy of Quentin Massys’ ironwork outside of the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp. Forged in the late-fifteenth to early-sixteenth century, this ironwork crowns one of the city’s public wells. The ironwork is topped by Antwerp’s founding legend of Brabo throwing the giant’s severed hand (as told in this earlier post). As a vital supply of fresh water, the well’s central position in Antwerp’s daily life explains the masterful craftsmanship that was put into this ornate civic artwork.
As the photo captures, people have gathered around the base of this well for nearly half a millennium to socialise and admire the city’s religious and mythic history.
The Love of a Blacksmith
Quentin Massys (1466-1530) began his life in Leuven and trained as a blacksmith. This was an age where the craft made the man, and once a craftsman had his profession, that was it. Massys was a blacksmith.
Love, as it often does, complicated things.
The legend goes that Massys fell deeply in love with Catharina Heyns, the daughter of a painter, and both wished to marry. Her father, however, refused to give his daughter’s hand to a lowly blacksmith – he was an upstanding painter with dyes staining his hands, not soot.
Massys was a blacksmith, but decided not to remain one. He took up the brush and chose for his starting opus to win the hand of Heyns. Finding one of her father’s canvases ready for use, Massys painted a realistic rendering of a fly on the bare canvas and retreated to wait for her father to come home.
When Heyns returned to his canvas, he saw the fly on its surface and tried to brush it away. After a few moments of swatting the empty air and shooing around it, he realised the trick! On discovering it was Massys who painted such a detailed fly, he changed his view of the man and gave his blessings for Massys and his daughter marry.
Massys later became the founder of the Antwerp School of Painting, known for its detailed realism that occasionally verged on the grotesque.
One question that this leaves us with is: was the first work in this artistic movement a convincing portrait of a fly?
This story is, or has become, a folk legend; the duller version being that he turned to painting because a sickness weakened him to the point where he could not pick up the hammer, so instead he turned to painting prints for carnival decorations. Whatever the case, Massys left his mark on the city of Antwerp and history of art.
True or simply romantic legend, the tale is memorialised around the base of the well with the words:
Dutch: “Dese putkevie werd gesmeed door Quinten Matsijs. De liefde maeckte van den smidt enen schilder”
English: “This ironwork was forged by Quinten Matsijs. Love made of the blacksmith a painter”
The Stories Behind the Public Artworks
All artworks have their stories; the art may be telling a story, such as the legend of Brabo, but the physical work itself, why and how it was made, and why it is where it is, is a whole other patina layered upon it. I have had cause in these articles to research and discover the stories surrounding statues and monuments in Waterloo, Brussels, and Antwerp. Each of these have had fascinating stories behind them, and I wanted to take a moment here to briefly acknowledge the value of not merely the artwork’s meaning, but the context of the art, and the background to its creation.
If you have the chance, consider looking into the history of any public artworks near you, or those that have struck you as particularly meaningful elsewhere. A few minutes of research will forever make the work and the landscape around it far more vivid each time you pass.
I hope you will join me next time for one more photograph of Antwerp, and the final glass plate of the first box.
Note on the Artist’s Name Used
There are a number of spellings for Quentin Massys’ name, I used “Massys” simply because it was the one written on the glass plate list in 1900. Other spellings include Quinten Matsys or Matsijs, among others.
References
‘The well of Quinten Matsijs’, Volksverhalen <https://www-volksverhalen-be.translate.goog/Put-van-Quinten-Matsijs?_x_tr_sl=nl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc>
1900 Glass Plates: This project explores a series of glass plates from the year 1900 with the eventual goal of travelling the same route as the photographer. It will be a varied journey that will stretch from simple blog posts examining each photo to videos and more. This project is in collaboration with photographer Aleksandar Nenad Zecevic, who’ll be restoring the photographs to bring out details dimmed by time. More to follow.
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