A Couple Making Music

In 1565 Antwerp was the busiest port in northern Europe, and its painters had found a new kind of buyer: merchants who wanted pictures for the wall at home rather than the church. Jan Massys worked that market. He helped make everyday subjects respectable, the merry companies and money changers and pairs of lovers, and this small oak panel shows a man and a woman making music together. In these Antwerp scenes music was the language of courtship and of worldly pleasure, and Massys usually gave such gatherings a sly moral edge, where temptation and bought affection are never far away. He signed and dated the picture at the lower left in 1565. The next August, in 1566, crowds across the Low Countries smashed the religious images in the churches, while a panel like this one hung safely in a private home.