MASP

Quentin Metsys (Seguidor de)

The Unequal Marriage, 1525-30

  • Author:
    Quentin Metsys (Seguidor de)
  • Bio:
  • Title:
    The Unequal Marriage
  • Date:
    1525-30
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre tela
  • Dimensions:
    54 x 89,5 x 0,5 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Barão Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, 1965
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00652
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS



The Unequal Marriage depicts a “grotesque marriage”—a young man marrying an old woman for her wealth—, a common theme in popular medieval culture and in Greek and Roman comedies. The topic also appears in widely circulated texts, especially from Northern Europe, including the poem “The Ship of Fools” (1494), by Sebastian Brant (1457-1521), and In Praise of Folly (1511), by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536). The painting is attributed to a follower of Quentin Metsys. The latter treats the same subject, although in a very different way, in a work in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., dated between 1520 and 1525. In addition to its proximity with Metsys’ work, the MASP painting also evinces a palpable relationship to the grotesque sketches of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). The couple in the center of the composition is derived from one of the Italian painter’s lost drawings, known only through a copy from c. 1602 (The Albertina Museum, Vienna) attributed to Jacob Hoefnagel (1575-1630), and reproduced in an engraving by Wenceslau Hollar (1607-1677) in 1646. Four of the other six figures are drawn from another Leonardo sketch conserved in Windsor called Five Grotesque Heads. The painting may reflect the great success of Leonardo’s comedic drawings throughout Europe, which were undoubtedly copied and reproduced by students and followers of the master active in Milan until the second half of the sixteenth century.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017





The previous title of the work was Marriage Contract. The title proposed here seems preferable because of its greater precision and because the theme shown belongs plainly in the tradition of the Ill-Matched-Pair or Ill-Assorted Lovers, or even, in Italian, the Sposalizio Grottesco that was widespread in northern painting in the 15th and 16th centuries, but also in Italian painting and engravings up to the 17th century (Pigler 1956, II, p. 544). It shows the celebration of a marriage between two people of widely differing ages – in this case, an old woman and a young man – a union based on the younger person’s interest in the older one’s money. Although it is going back to an old medieval, tradition, which in turn makes use of a theme from even older comedies, in northern European literature the idea takes on a satirical dimension whose greatest manifestation occurs in the famous poem The Ship of Fools (Das Narrens-chi) by Sebastian Brant (1494). In his chapter 52 (“Wibe durch gutz Wille”), Brant talks of one of the aspects of madness, “marrying for money”. The theme reappears, dealt with in a very humorous way, in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Madness (Stultitia laus, Antwerp, 1512) and especially in chapter 31, in which the great humanist looks at the alternative case of the rich old woman and a handsome young man, in an extraordinary passage that could well be an exact literary source for the Masp painting: “But what is most delightful is to see old women, so old, so cadaverous, that they look as if they have just returned from Hell, saying over and over again, ‘Life is beautiful!’ They are like bitches on heat, or as the Greeks jokingly have it, they smell like goats. They seduce some young Peacock with their gold (...) Everyone makes fun of them and calls them what they are – off their heads”. Other possible literary sources for the subject are discussed by Silver (1974, pp. 115-117) who cites in particular a collection of poems of this type published in 1530 by the painter and publisher Jan van Doesborch, who was a colleague of Metsys in the Guild of St. Luke in Antwerp. The theme was also popularized in 15th-century German prints, as we see from two prints by the Master of the Book of Household Accounts (Hausbuchmeister, active between 1465 and 1500 and considered to be the inventor of the drypoint technique), that were copied by Israhel van Meckenen (Bartsch VI, 266, n. 169 and n. 170), which must have influenced Dürer (Bartsch 93) and Cranach, as well as certain other Flemish masters of the following generation, including Metsys. The theme was dealt with by Metsys in a well-known work in the National Gallery of Washington usually dated between 1522 and 1523, that is, from the last period of the artist’s activity. In 1974, in a precise analysis of the work, which had only just been acquired by the Washington Gallery, Silver recapitulates the theories proposed in the historiography, starting with Baldass and Friedländer, concerning Leonardo’s influence on Metsys. Other authorities with no particular interest in the Washington painting, such as Bautier (1975, p. 187), have also pointed out this influence. Still in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, the work was described by Friedländer (1947, p. 115) as a “replica” by Metsys. A second version of the same picture, of a similar size (56 x 84 cm), in the C.Y. Pallitz Collection in New York, was also described by Larsen (1950, p. 171) as a work by Metsys. In 1974, (p. 109, fig. 9) and again in 1984 (fig. 134), Silver writes of the Masp version, without mentioning its present whereabouts, correctly referring to it as a work of the school of Metsys, calling it in 1984 Ill-matched Pair and Merry Company. It is now that the critic recognizes that there are two oddly articulated Leonardo-type figures in this work, which turn out to be a montage of two separate ideas of Leonardo’s. The couple in the center of the composition come from a lost Leonardo drawing that is known to us only from a print of c.1620 attributed to Jacob Hoefnagel (1575-c.1630). The print shows Leonardo’s interest in the iconography of The Unequal Marriage, an interest that probably originated in his knowledge of northern painting and prints that he translated into the language of his own world of experiments in physiognomy. Four of the six figures surrounding the couple are based on another, more famous Leonardo drawing in Windsor Castle, called Five Deformed Heads (12495r.). This drawing, which has been closely studied in the Leonardo literature since Mariette, was recently analyzed again by Caroli (1990, p. 70) and by Cagliati Arano (in Marani, Nepi Sciré, 1992, p. 320). Dated by Clark-Pedretti (1968, i, p. 84) to 1494, it possibly echoes, according to Cagliati Arano, Leonardo’s notes on medieval bestiaries in Manuscript H, from the same year, 1494 – especially in the detail of the beast-like head with its open mouth. That the five heads enjoyed great and longstanding prestige is clear from the presence of two copies in the Louvre (Braun 62212) and in the Grossherzogliches Museum in Weimar (Braun 79651), as well as the 17th-century print by Wenzel Hollar (1607-1677). Our artist was definitely familiar with at least one copy of this drawing since the two heads on the left and one, or even both, heads on the right, are more or less faithful copies from Leonardo. There is good reason to believe that the Masp work dates from no earlier than the third decade of the 16th century. This is firstly because figures influenced by Leonardo were not widely known in the Low Countries before the 1520s, that is, before Leonardo’s time at the Court of Francis I, between 1516 and 1519. Leonardo’s influence on the Antwerp style, on the style of painters like Joos van Cleve, Cornelis Anthonisz, and Coecke van Aelst was only established during and after these years that Leonardo spent in France. Secondly, it is because Leonardo’s influence is often filtered through the interpretation given it by Metsys, who openly copied Leonardo’s figures in works painted during the same period, such as the Grotesque Old Woman in the National Gallery of London and in works painted as early as the 1520s, such as St. John the Baptist and Christ Kissing (Chatsworth, Devonshire) and the Unequal Marriage in Washington that has already been mentioned. We may, thus, conclude that the Masp painting can be firmly dated to the 1520s or, at the latest, the end of the decade.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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