Bart: No no, because it is a crazy portrait. Really, I mean, but I didn't want to put it like that.
It's especially the sort of monstrous figure and the skull that of course
caught our attention, and we had to wonder what could that possibly be?
Larry: Well the picture kind of
bumps up against our preconceived notions of what a Hals should look like. He might have other ideas
for us. We don't know yet!
Bart: I'm Bart Cornelis, the Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at
the National Gallery, and also curator of this large monographic exhibition devoted to
Frans Halls. Well, we included Isaac Massa in the exhibition because it is, for starters, one of
the best portraits by Frans Hals that we know, one of the most striking ones. One of the things that
we've often wondered about with this picture is his pose, where he's got his arms across his chest,
which is a very peculiar pose and it's often been said that it sort of prefigures the way
maybe 19th century artists would have painted a person. So it was always seen as a peculiar
pose to begin with. So we felt it was important to include portraits of Isaac Massa partly because
Isaac Massa clearly brought out the best in Frans Hals. This very relaxed sort of attitude
in these portraits. We decided that we would love to have, you know, a whole wall if you want of
portraits of Isaac Massa. The double portrait from the Rijksmuseum, the one from Chatsworth in that
very peculiar pose with his arms across his chest and another one where he sits backwards on a chair,
but which by the way is probably the first time an artist ever painted someone sitting backwards
on a chair. Also because Isaac Massa was clearly a friend of Frans Hals. We know that because he
he was a witness to the baptism of one of Hals' children and that's something you would likely
give to someone you knew fairly well. That also might explain his very casual pose,
which, if you know someone that well, you might go to that length, to do that kind of thing,
and take that liberty really.
Larry: That in itself is very interesting when you see the same artist
painting somebody over time in different ways.
Bart: While we were restoring the picture it turned
out that the background -- you know, he sits in this oval -- but the background to the portrait
was actually over-painted. When the restorer had this hunch that there was something underneath
the paint, we used infrared reflectography to go behind the painting, as it were. That's
one way of looking through the upper layers and see what is actually visible, what is there
underneath the visible layers, and it turned out that there were indeed all sorts of things going
on over the shoulder of this figure. It's any fascinating that you were able to
sort of discern there was something underneath there, before, you know, we even did any kind
of technical photography.
Paul: Yeah I mean there are some bits of impasto which relate to the lion or gargoyle head.
These little elements here always kind of shone through. Those pale patches.
So there was something, some evidence of something being there.
Bart: You can see that there's two heads over his left shoulder,
as well as a scroll coming down from his other shoulder,
and a coat of arms. So that's the beauty of these techniques, that we could not only see
those shapes, but we could even identify in some cases which colours they would have been through
XRF imaging. But it's especially the sort of monstrous figure and the skull that
of course caught our attention, and we had to wonder, what could that possibly be? And it's
interesting because it's bound up also with the identity of the sitter. It was often thought it was
Isaac Massa, but not everyone was equally certain it was him. But these details actually helped us
to identify him with certainty as Isaac Massa, because what this is, this monstrous figure
over his shoulder, she's clearly a personification of Envy. Envy is traditionally snakes for hair, and
not only that, she holds, as you can see in other images, images that identify the pigment red,
she holds a heart in front of her mouth. And that's exactly what Envy does. It essentially
still exists in the English language when we say 'eat your heart out'. Envy, jealousy. And then next with a
skeleton. Now what has that to do with Isaac Massa, is the question. He's a very interesting person he
was, you know, he was a grain merchant. A very well-to-do grain merchant. He spent many years in Moscow.
Larry: Yeah, he was a broker with the Imperial Court, wasn't he, really?
Bart: Yes, and grain then as now was one of the largest exports from Russia.
Larry: A lot of what we know about Russia at the time comes from him.
Bart: It comes from him because he talks in, he writes about the 'The Troubles' as the
Russians refer to them in Russia. And so that was Isaac Massa. Now there were quite
a few other merchants active in Russia as well, and when we looked into his biography it's
quite clear that he had many detractors. People who thought that this young upstart was doing
too well, essentially, and in fact they went a bit further, and they said that he was
disingenuous, and that his mixture of official business and trade was questionable.
It's neither here nor there whether there's any truth in that. The thing is
that those noises were made. Isaac Massa was obsessed with the idea that there were other
people who were not happy with what he was doing in his sort of diplomatic role. Their jealousy
is, as it were, personified in this portrait through the image of Envy, and then there's a skull next to
it, and then we had to look into that, because why would there be a skull next to Envy? And the answer
to that lies in an emblem book that shows how Envy is being trampled by Death. Death in the shape of a
skeleton. And the caption to that emblem, which is exactly from the right period,
and could have been known to Hals quite easily, it explains that only Death overcomes or
Envy, essentially. So that's the message that Isaac Massa really wanted to send in
this painting to his audience, that, you know, you can slander me all you like, because that's how he
viewed it, but death will in the end put an end to it. It's a peculiar message to send in a portrait really,
because on the one hand you say you can slander me all you like, I don't care and yet on the other
hand, you take the effort, you make the effort to have all that portrayed in your portrait,
all those elements there. You clearly do care. It's also interesting to note that the figure
of Envy is clearly after an engraving that would have been available to Frans Hals. An engraving
by Goltzius. If you flip the engraving so that it's the other way around, you see a very clear
connection with the figure of Envy, even including the sort of wavy snake hair that comes from
behind the skull. That's how the portrait would originally have looked, it's a very, I
don't know really any other examples of that particular sort of very specific iconography
where a sitter clearly requests, because this wouldn't have been Frans Hals' own invention, this
would have been something that the sitter [Isaac Massa] would have requested, and it's very peculiar iconography
for a portrait. It was probably painted out quite early, on possibly after Isaac Massa's death in
1643, when his descendants may have thought, 'well, we don't particularly want to look at
our father, or grandfather, in this particular circumstances and we'd rather have just a
portrait'. And it was overpainted early on so there was also no question that we would remove
it. The paint that's used for the over-paint is indistinguishable really from any other 17th
century paint, and there's no reason to think that it wasn't applied early on.
And so that's the the fascinating story behind this portrait that we have and
that we, through these elements that we see in the background, can also be certain
that we're looking at a portrait of Isaac Massa, which had been doubted by some.