Hugely famous in its day. Missing for centuries. Transformed by conservation: Quentin Metsys's masterpiece, The Madonna of the Cherries (2024)

It’s not known precisely why, aged around 20, Quentin Metsys turned his back on the family trade and became a painter. That trade was blacksmithing, in his native city of Leuven. According to one of Metsys’s biographers, Karel van Mander, he quit due to a physical impairment which left him too weak to wield a hammer.

Another story goes that the young man fell in love with a beautiful young woman who thought little of his profession. A rival for her affections was a painter, which prompted Metsys to pick up a paintbrush himself. This version of events is reflected in a plaque above his tombstone at Antwerp Cathedral, which proclaims: ‘Love transformed a blacksmith into an Apelles’ — Apelles having been one of the great painters of classical Greece.

Whatever the truth, Metsys went on to have a stellar career in his new métier. Having moved from Leuven to Antwerp at the end of the 15th century, he became that city’s leading painter, and was visited by reverent artists from far and wide, including the German master Albrecht Dürer in 1520.

On 2 July 2024, The Madonna of the Cherries, one of Metsys’s most celebrated paintings, is being offered in the Old Masters Part I sale at Christie’s in London — following a landmark rediscovery.

Depicting the Virgin and Child, the picture is modest in size, and would have been intended for private devotion: the viewer is brought into intimate closeness with the holy figures. It dates from the 1520s — the mature period of Metsys’s career. That was a decade in which he produced several paintings such as this of the Virgin and Child in the moment of a maternal kiss (another example being the ‘Butter Madonna’ of around 1525, today housed in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie). Metsys was echoing a Byzantine pictorial tradition where the baby Jesus nestles into his mother’s cheek.

Mary here sits on an elaborate marble throne resplendent with golden foliate tracery, an allusion to her future status as the Queen of Heaven. This is contrasted with her modest attire: a plain mauve dress lacking ornamentation, and a simple diaphanous headdress. Metsys was duly bridging the divine and the human realms.

Isolated fruits carry symbolic value, the eponymous cherries in the Virgin’s right hand especially. Associated with paradise, cherries represent the holy duo’s purity, while their red colour also calls to mind the blood shed by Christ at the crucifixion.

Depictions of the Virgin and Child with cherries in hand were fashionable among northern European artists of Metsys’s time. The composition is believed to have been invented by Leonardo da Vinci, whose (now lost) prototype picture from the first decade of the 16th century was adapted by his student Giampietrino. In an interesting chain of artistic influence, Giampietrino’s painting was admired by the Antwerp artist Joos van Cleve, who produced several ‘Madonna of the Cherries’ scenes of his own and popularised the composition north of the Alps.

Among the innovative elements that Metsys introduced was trompe l’oeil: witness the parapet (and the apple and bunch of grapes on top of it), as well as the green curtain to the right, all of which are painted with great illusionistic effect. According to another of his biographers, Alexander van Fornenbergh, many early viewers thought that that curtain was real and asked for it to be moved aside so as to ‘see the work in all its glory’.

Metsys died in 1530, roughly halfway through a period explored in author Michael Pye’s 2021 book, Antwerp: The Glory Years. For Pye, the city was at its peak between 1501 (when Portuguese traders of Asian spices helped establish Antwerp as a shipping hub) and 1566 (the year of Calvinist-led iconoclasm known as the Beeldenstorm).

The English magus John Dee described the city in that period as ‘the emporium of all Europe’. Artistically, too, it was thriving. Metsys was the founding figure of the so-called Antwerp School of painting — his followers a century or so later including Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck.

He was renowned for his portraits and religious works, a famous example of the latter being a triptych known as the Altarpiece of the Joiners’ Guild for Antwerp Cathedral (today in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp).

Even more celebrated was The Madonna of the Cherries. Fascinating proof comes in the form of a picture from 1628, The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, by the Antwerp School painter Willem van Haecht.

It depicts an actual moment 13 years earlier, when the wealthy spice merchant and renowned art collector Cornelis van der Geest was visited by the regents of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Albert VII of Austria and Archduch*ess Isabella Clara Eugenia. We find them all in the vast fantasy Kunstkammer at Van der Geest’s harbourside mansion, where — amid myriad fine paintings — the regents are said to have offered to acquire one work in particular: Metsys’s The Madonna of the Cherries.

The episode was recounted in mid-17th-century literary sources, too. Van Fornenbergh claimed that ‘the archduke so fell in love with this picture… that he used all the means of the suitor to acquire [it]’. Apparently, however, nothing could tempt Van der Geest to part with his most prized possession. ‘His Highness was rejected with the most respectful courtesy and [the owner’s] own love prevailed above the favour of the prince.’

In Van Haecht’s painting, the regents are both seated; Van der Geest stands before them, with one hand gesturing towards The Madonna of the Cherries and the other placed above his heart, as if to stress what the picture means to him.

The fantastical scene is filled out by an assembly of important merchants, civic officials and artists — all of them there to marvel at Van der Geest’s collection. Rubens can be seen beside the Archduke, extolling the painting’s virtues to him and the Archduch*ess. Also present is Van Dyck, who stands behind his host and chats to Antwerp’s mint master.

Other standout works on view in the Kunstkammer include Battle of the Amazons (circa 1618) by Rubens, and Woman at Her Toilet, a now-lost masterpiece by Jan van Eyck from the 1430s. The implication is that Metsys provided a crucial link between the past and future peaks of Flemish painting.

Also portrayed, incidentally, is a subsequent owner of The Madonna of the Cherries: the collector Peeter Stevens, who is seen nonchalantly resting his right arm on a table at the centre of the gallery, admiring a portrait miniature.

All trace of Metsys’s painting was lost following its sale (to an unknown buyer) after Stevens’s death in 1668. Its huge popularity had resulted in many copies of it being painted, but none was ever deemed of sufficiently high quality to be considered Metsys’s original.

The painting reappeared at a sale in Paris in 1920, but by then it was disguised by several additions, most notably a translucent green curtain drawn across the window and landscape. With this overpainting and a thick layer of discoloured varnish, the work was offered for sale at Christie’s in 2015 as a studio version. It was only after the transformative subsequent conservation that scholars were able to recognise the work as the prime version of Metsys’s masterpiece.

This is one of the great paintings of Flemish art. Its rediscovery offers collectors a fresh bite at some very special cherries.

Classic Week — Art from antiquity to the 20th century — takes place from 2 to 10 July 2024 at Christie’s in London. Highlights include Titian’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the rediscovered The Madonna of the Cherries by Quentin Metsys and Frans Hals’s Portrait of a gentleman of the de Wolff family. The pre-sale view opens on 28 June