Vierge à l'Enfant avec anges

Around 1509 the busy port of Antwerp was pulling trade and money away from Bruges, and a new generation of painters there was turning the city into the centre of Flemish art. Metsys led them. Yet for this small panel, made for private prayer at home, he looked back nearly a century to Jan van Eyck. The Virgin stands under an arch on columns of polished onyx and crystal, the kind of jewel-like precision van Eyck had perfected before Metsys was born. Her hair falls loose and long, a traditional sign of virginity. It is the sort of intimate, old-fashioned devotional image a wealthy Antwerp family would keep for themselves rather than give to a church.