Madonna and Child with Angels

Quinten Metsys's Madonna and Child with Angels belongs to the devotional panel tradition of Antwerp painting in the early sixteenth century, when Metsys was the city's leading master and its painters were responding intensively to Italian Renaissance influence arriving through prints, drawings, and the works of Italian artists visible in the Low Countries. Metsys had studied the paintings of Leonardo and his followers — particularly the soft modelling and sfumato technique — and incorporated Italian elements into his fundamentally Flemish approach, creating a distinctive hybrid that proved enormously popular with Antwerp's prosperous merchant class.

Italian influence is visible in the soft tonal modelling of the Madonna's face and the Christ Child — Leonardo-derived sfumato replacing the harder Flemish linearity of the preceding generation.