The Holy Virgin with the Child Jesus

This Holy Virgin with Child, dated to 1450 and attributed to Metsys, presents a chronological problem since Metsys was born around 1466. The attribution is therefore likely incorrect, or the date is erroneous. The Snijders and Rockox House in Antwerp, a museum dedicated to the collector Nicolaas Rockox who was Rubens’s patron, holds the work. If genuinely from the 1450s, it would predate Metsys by a generation. Metsys's religious paintings combine the Flemish tradition of meticulous naturalism with compositional ideas absorbed from Italian Renaissance models.

The painting’s style, with its gold ground and hieratic composition, is consistent with mid-fifteenth-century Netherlandish devotional painting rather than Metsys’s documented manner.