Hans Memling was a German-Flemish painter who worked in the tradition of Early Netherlandish painting. Born in the Middle Rhine region, he probably spent his childhood in Mainz. During his apprenticeship as a painter he moved to the Netherlands and spent time in the Brussels workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. In 1465 he was made a citizen of Bruges, where he became one of the leading artists and the master of a large workshop. A tax document from 1480 lists him among the wealthiest citizens. Memling's religious works often incorporated donor portraits of the clergymen, aristocrats, and burghers who were his patrons. These portraits built upon the styles which Memling learned in his youth.
Paintings by Hans Memling
The Last Judgment (Memling) (1469)
The Last Judgment is a triptych attributed to Flemish painter Hans Memling and was painted between 1467 and 1471, and depicts Last Judgment during the second coming of Jesus Christ. The central panel shows Jesus sitting in judgment on the world, while St Michael the Archangel weighs souls: he sends the damned towards Hell (the sinner in St. Michael's right-hand scale pan is a donor portrait of Tommaso Portinari); the left-hand panel shows the saved being guided into heaven by St Peter and the angels.
The triptych was commissioned by Angelo Tani, an agent of the Medici at Bruges for the Chapel of St Michael at Badia Fiesolana, but was captured at sea by Paul Beneke, a privateer from Danzig. A lengthy lawsuit against the Hanseatic League demanded its return to Italy. It was placed in the Basilica of the Assumption but in the 20th century it was moved to its present location at the National Museum in Gdańsk in Poland.
Annunciation (Memling) (1480)
The Annunciation is a panel-painting by the Early Netherlandish artist Hans Memling. It depicts the Annunciation as the archangel Gabriel's announces to the Virgin Mary that she will conceive and become the mother of Jesus, as described in the Gospel of Luke. The painting was executed in the 1480s and transferred to canvas from its original oak panel sometime after 1928. It is today held in the Robert Lehman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The panel shows Mary in a domestic interior with two attendant angels. Gabriel is dressed in ecclesiastical robes, while a dove hovers above Mary, representing the Holy Spirit. It expands upon the Annunciation wing of Rogier van der Weyden's Saint Columba Altarpiece of c. 1455. According to the art historian Maryan Ainsworth, the work is a "startlingly original image, rich in connotations for the viewer or worshiper".
Advent and Triumph of Christ (1480)
Advent and Triumph of Christ is an oil painting on a panel of wood, painted c.1480 by German-born Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. It was made for the altar of the Tanners' guild in Our Lady's Church in Bruges, but is now held by the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.
The painting shows 25 episodes from the Life of Christ (although some have interpreted it as a version of the Seven Joys of the Virgin) combined in one narrative composition without a central dominating scene: including the Annunciation; the Annunciation to the shepherds; the Nativity; the Massacre of the Innocents; the Adoration of the Magi; the Passion; the Resurrection; the Ascension; Pentecost; the Dormition and Assumption of Mary.
Scenes from the Passion of Christ (1470)
Scenes from the Passion of Christ is an oil painting on a panel of Baltic oak, painted c.1470 by German-born Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. The painting shows 23 vignettes of the Life of Christ combined in one narrative composition without a central dominating scene: 19 episodes from the Passion of Christ, the Resurrection, and three later appearances of the risen Christ (to Mary Magdalene, on the road to Emmaus, and at the Sea of Galilee). The painting was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, an Italian banker based in Bruges, who is depicted in a donor portrait kneeling and praying in the lower left corner, with his wife, Maria Baroncelli, in a similar attitude in the lower right corner.
The painting is relatively small, 56.7 × 92.2 cm, and is unlikely to have been an altarpiece. It may have been intended for Portinari's chapel in the church of St Jacob in Bruges. It was not catalogued in Portinari's belongings when he died in 1501, and is thought to have been moved from Bruges to Florence between 1510 and 1520. It is first recorded in the collection of Cosimo I in Florence in 1550. The painting is now in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin.
St. Ursula Shrine (1489)
The Shrine of St. Ursula is a carved and gilded wooden reliquary containing oil on panel inserts (87x33x91 cm) by Hans Memling. Dating to c. 1489, it is housed in the Hans Memling Museum in the Old St. John's Hospital (Sint-Janshospitaal), Bruges, in the Flemish Region of modern-day Belgium.
The work was commissioned by the Hospital of St. John, the current museum's seat. Differently from other works by Memling, such as the St John Altarpiece or the Jan Floreins Altarpiece, it is neither signed nor dated. It was a container for Saint Ursula's relics which was shown publicly only on her feast day. The relics were solemnly put in the shrine on 21 October 1489.
Diptych of Maarten van Nieuwenhove (1487)
The Diptych of Maarten van Nieuwenhove is a 1487 painting by Hans Memling, showing on the left side the Virgin and Child, and on the right side Maarten van Nieuwenhove. It is now kept in the Old St. John's Hospital in Bruges. It is unsigned, but has invariably been attributed to Hans Memling since the middle of the 19th century.
The painting is an early example of an Early Netherlandish devotional diptych, which still preserves the original frame and hinges. A new invention was showing the scene in a continuous room, instead of against a monochrome background.
Bathsheba (Memling) (1485)
Bathsheba (or The Toilet of Bathsheba After the Bath) is a c. 1485 oil on wood panel painting by the Early Netherlandish artist Hans Memling, now in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. The painting is a rare 15th century depiction of a nude person in Northern Renaissance art; such figures typically only appeared in representations of the Last Judgement, and were hardly as deliberately erotic. Memling is attributed one other secular nude portrait, in the center panel of his c. 1485 Vanitas allegory Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg.
It shows Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite and later of David, assisted by her maid as she rises from her indoor bath, as related in 2 Samuel 11. Bathsheba is naked save a robe which the maid is about to wrap but hasn't quite wrapped around her. The women are indoors but before an open window which leads out to a courtyard and skyscape. The bath from which Bathsheba emerges is pillared, with a roof of cushioned black velvet. There is a small white dog by her right foot. In the background, King David and a boy can be seen standing on the balcony high above.
Christ Surrounded by Singing and Music-making Angels (1489)
Christ Surrounded by Singing and Music-making Angels or Santa María la Real de Nájera Altarpiece, is a triptych by the Flemish painter of German origin Hans Memling, active in Bruges in the second half of fifteenth-century. The altarpiece was commissioned by wealthy Spanish traders as the high altarpiece for the monastic church of Santa Maria la Real in Nájera. Only three panels of the original altarpiece survive. In the nineteenth century, they were acquired by the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Antwerp, where they are now exhibited. These panels have been described as an avant-garde work in Renaissance decorative art.
The altarpiece was commissioned in 1487 by the consuls of the Spanish merchants in Bruges, Pedro, and Antonio de Nájera, to decorate the organ of the Santa María la Real of Nájera, the former pantheon of the kings of Navarre. Some of the ornaments of the 17 (larger-than-life) figures depicted bear the arms of Castile and León. The original altarpiece was huge, and the three surviving paintings were likely part of its upper tier. The central panel depicted the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.
St John Altarpiece (Memling) (1470)
The St John Altarpiece (sometimes the Triptych of the two Saints John or the Triptych of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist) is a large oil-on-oak hinged-triptych altarpiece completed around 1479 by the Early Netherlandish master painter Hans Memling. It was commissioned in the mid-1470s in Bruges for the Old St. John's Hospital (Sint-Janshospitaal) during the building of a new apse. It is signed and dated 1479 on the original frame – its date of installation – and is today still at the hospital in the Memling museum.
The altarpiece consists of five paintings – a central inner panel and two double-sided wings. The panels on the reverse of wings are visible when the shutters are closed, and show the hospital donors flanked by their patron saints. The interior contains a central panel with the enthroned Virgin and Child flanked by saints; the left wing features episodes from the life of John the Baptist with emphasis on his beheading; the right wing shows the apocalypse as recorded by John of Patmos, pictured writing on the island of Patmos.
Portrait of Maria Portinari (1470)
Portrait of Maria Portinari is a small c. 1470 painting by Hans Memling in tempera and oil on oak panel. It portrays Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, about whom very little is known. She is about 14 years old, and depicted shortly before her wedding to the Italian banker, Tommaso Portinari. Maria is dressed in the height of late fifteenth-century fashion, with a long black hennin with a transparent veil and an elaborate jewel-studded necklace. Her headdress is similar and a necklace identical to those in her depiction in Hugo van der Goes's later Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475), a painting that may have been partly based on Memling's portrait.
The panel is the right wing of a devotional and hinged triptych; the lost center panel is recorded in sixteenth-century inventories as a Virgin and Child, and the left panel depicts Tommaso. The panels were commissioned by Tommaso, a member of a prominent Florentine family. Tommaso was a confidant of Charles the Bold and an ambitious manager of the Bruges branch of a bank controlled by Lorenzo de' Medici, and a well known and active patron of Flemish art. Tommaso eventually lost his position due to a series of large and risky unsecured loans given to Charles.
Donne Triptych (1480)
The Donne Triptych (or Donne Altarpiece) is a hinged-triptych altarpiece by the Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. The painting was created around 1478 for the soldier, courtier and diplomat Sir John Donne. The triptych comprises three panels that include five individual paintings. The central interior panel depicts the Virgin and Child, donor portraits of Sir John Donne, the patron, along with his wife and daughter, as well as Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Barbara, the two double-sided wings include images of Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist on the interior sides of the wings, and Saint Christopher and Saint Anthony Abbot on the two exteriors of the wings.
Art historians have debated whether the altarpiece was painted in the early 1480s, around the same time Memling painted the Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Barbara, in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An earlier date of sometime in the late 1470s is possible, at the time he completed the similar St John Altarpiece, or it may have been painted as a precursor to that altarpiece.
Portrait of a Man with a Roman Medal (1473)
The Portrait of a Man with a Roman Medal is a painting by the German-born Flemish artist Hans Memling, dating to c. 1480 and housed in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium.
The painting portrays a man from a three-quarter point of view, with an attention to details typical of Flemish painting. The man is wearing a black coat and a hat of the same color. In the left hand, he is showing a sestertius of emperor Nero, a symbol of his attention to Humanism. In the background is a lake landscape: Memling was one of the first painters to use natural landscapes for backgrounds of portraits (instead of the traditional black one), influencing later Renaissance artists such as Sandro Botticelli and Pietro Perugino.