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

42. In this painting commissioned
by Tommaso Portinari from Hans
Memling, Christ's Passion and his
appearances after death are depicted
in a simultaneous narrative, beginning
with his entry into Jerusalem
at the upper left and concluding
with his appearance to the apostles
on the Sea of Tiberias at the upper
right. Tommaso appears at the
lower left next to Judas's betrayal
in the garden of Gethsemane. At
the right Tommaso's wife is witness
to Christ's suffering on the
road to Calvary. Galleria
Sabauda, Turin
43, 44. In these details of the
Turin Passion, the figures of
Tommaso and Maria Portinari,
only four inches high, are viewed
from precisely the same angles as
the heads in Memling's portraits of
them at the Metropolitan (figs. 40,
41), and the portrayals are very
similar. The Turin portraits were
probably modeled after the larger,
more detailed ones at the Museum
Shortly thereafter, perhaps as early as 1473,
Tommaso Portinari commissioned from
Hugo van der Goes the renowned altarpiece in
the Uffizi that bears his name (fig. 45). The
most important fifteenth-century Flemish
work of art after the Ghent Altarpiece (see fig.
14), the Portinari Altarpiece was probably
completed about 1475, although it did not
reach its intended destination, the high altar of
the Church of Sant' Egidio in the Hospital of
Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, until 1483.
The triptych includes portraits of the donors
with their children in the wings, and it is by
the number of offspring and their placement
that the work is dated. The donors and their
two eldest children are accompanied by their
patron saints. Their third child, Pigello, is
squeezed in behind his older brother, Antonio,
and seems to have been worked into the composition
as an afterthought. Moreover, he is
not depicted with a patron saint. Hence, it is
likely that the work was commissioned before
Pigello's birth in 1474. A fourth child, Maria,
was born probably in 1475, and as she is not
included here, the altarpiece must have been
nearly finished by that date.
In the wings of the Portinari Altarpiece,
Hugo, remarkably, has revived the archaic device
of distinguishing saints from mortals by a
hierarchy of scale. Nonetheless, Saint Thomas
stands with one foot on Tommaso's robes, recalling
the detail in van Eyck's Virgin and Child
with Canon van der Paele and similarly emphasizing
the illusion of the donor's physical
proximity to holy personages. The event in
the center panel attended by the donors is the
Nativity. Rather than a historical representation,
it is an eternal, mystical Nativity
embodying the liturgy of the Mass. The donors,
like all the figures in the center panel,
adore the infant Christ, whose isolated, prone
body is paralleled by the sheaf of wheat in the
foreground, symbol of the Eucharist.
Tommaso's head is, unfortunately, poorly
preserved, but that of Maria (fig. 46) can be
compared to Memling's portrait at the Museum,
providing an opportunity to see how
different artists treated the same sitter. The
even lighting and angle of vision chosen by
Memling produce a more generalized image
than Hugo's-one that conforms more to
the contemporary ideal of feminine beauty.
Hugo's harsher modeling and more oblique
angle of vision render a sharper, pointed face