Early Flemish Portraits 1425-1525: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ...

18. In Hans Memling's painting of
the Virgin and Child with Saints
Catherine and Barbara and musicmaking
angels, the donor portrait-worked
in at the leftseems
to be an intrusion. Painted
about 1480, the picture repeats the
composition of the center panel of
Memling's Hospital of Saint John
altarpiece (fig. 19). The artist's
predilection for symmetry has resulted
in a curious compositional
solution that balances the donor
with Saint Barbara's tower. The
grape bower is an addition, possibly
by another artist, painted
over the landscape background.
27 287/8 in. Bequest of Benjamin
Altman, 1913 (14.40.634)
19. Probably commissioned shortly
before 1475 and completed in
1479, the high altarpiece for the
chapel of the Hospital of Saint
John, in Bruges, is Hans Memling's
greatest work. The center
panel of the triptych shows the
Virgin and Child flanked by angels,
Saints Catherine of Alexandria
and Barbara (representatives
of the active and contemplative
lives respectively), and SaintsJohn
the Baptist andJohn the Evangelist
(patrons of the hospital). In
a painting at the Metropolitan
Museum (fig. 18), Memling repeated
the lower half of the center
panel's composition, with minor
variations, for a donor whose portrait
he added at the left. In another
work of about 1480, the John
Donne Triptych in the National
Gallery, London, Memling
adapted the whole composition to a
triptych format and included donor
portraits of Donne, his wife, and
their daughter. Memlingmuseum
O.C.M.W, Sint-Jans Hospitaal,
Bruges
hers is impaled with his on the right.
The deceased is presented by her patron
saint, Anne, who is accompanied by diminutive
figures of her daughter, the Virgin Mary,
and of the Christ Child, which serve as her
attributes. This convention produces an odd
arrangement whereby Anna turns her back on
the Christ Child, who nonetheless appears to
bless her. If this is the original frame, the fact
that it bears no traces of hinges indicates that
the panel was not the right half of a diptych,
but quasi-independent. It may have been intended
for display beside an altarpiece, the object
of Anna's devotion, near her grave in the
Church of Our Lady, in Bruges.
It is not known whether the Metropolitan's
Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine by Hans
Memling (fig. 18) served a commemorative
function. Although they are realized here in a
less distinguished form, the desires of the
anonymous donor were probably much the
same as those of Canon van der Paele. The
donor is inconspicuously introduced at the
back of a gathering of the Virgin and Child,
Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Barbara,
and two music-making angels set in a garden
of paradise. His devotion to the cult of the
Virgin is demonstrated by the prayer beads
he holds. The picture's title derives from the
Christ Child's action. He puts a ring on the
finger of Catherine, who saw herself in a vision
mystically united with Christ as his
bride. (The Christ Child's action serves here as
one of Catherine's attributes, in addition to
her sword and wheel.) However, the title does
not account for the equally prominent Saint
Barbara, whose attribute, the tower, looms
behind her.
The composition of the painting depends
directly upon the center panel of the high altarpiece
that Memling completed in 1479 for
the Hospital of Saint John in Bruges (fig. 19).
text continues on p. 30 25