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

47-49. This triptych by Hans
Memling was painted in 1487 for
Benedetto Portinari, who was
twenty-one-two years younger
than Marten van Nieuwenhove,
for whom Memling painted in the
same year a very similar work
(fig. 39). Here a half-length
Virgin and Child is flanked by a
devotional portrait of Benedetto at
the right and an image of his patron
saint, Benedict, at the left.
The wings are first recorded in
1825, in the Hospital of Santa
Maria Nuova, Florence, an institution
founded and maintained
by the Portinari family. The reverse
of the portrait displays the
sitter's emblem, a cut oak branch
from which new growth sprouts,
and his device, DE BONO IN
MELIUS (From good to better), on
a banderole. Benedetto and his
older brother Folco worked with
their uncle Tommaso Portinari in
Bruges. They bought out his financial
interests in 1497. Folco
died in 1527 and Benedetto in
1551. Left and right: Galleria
degli Uffizi, Florence. Center:
Staatliche Museen Preussischer
Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Dahlem
means-backgrounds of varying perspectives.
Lodovico, like the donor in the Merode
Triptych, seems to view the Virgin through an
opening, the window to his right, yet the object
of his devotion is apart from his space and
abstracted, as if it were a vision. Curiously,
the Virgin and Child with angels are found
again in the landscape in the portrait panel.
The man drawing water in the foreground
must be Joseph, and his inclusion suggests
that the scene is the Rest on the Flight into
Egypt. The left panel of the diptych seems to
be a close-up view of the diminutive Virgin
and Child, envisioned by the patron in his
devout contemplation.
It is only through the fortuitous survival of
information that we have been able to consider
as a group five works of art commissioned
by and including portraits of members
of the Portinari family. If we knew the sitters'
identities in more fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury
Flemish paintings, larger patterns of
patronage would no doubt emerge. Still, it is
clear from the patronage of the Portinari and
other Italians in Flanders that they were par-
ticularly appreciative of the talents of local
artists, and especially of their skills as portraitists.
Flemish painters' technique enabled them to
capture the appearances of worldly splendor
that status-conscious sitters desired: the richness
of their fur collars and hats, of their silk
damask and velvet brocade garments, of their
jewelry and their illuminated books of hours.
But at the same time the naturalistic style of
Flemish artists made possible-especially in
half-length devotional portraits-the creation
of an illusionistic reality that not only records
the sitters' appearances but also attests to their
piety and their hope for the redemption of
their souls.
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