Hans Memling. Alfred Michiels

      On approaching Bruges, one notes a tall tower with a warlike aspect that dominates the roofs of the city, and seems more like the dungeon in a fortress than a church’s bell tower. But it is the bell tower of Notre Dame. No statues, mouldings, or engravings embellish this imposing mass. It proudly thrusts out its heavy walls, grave as the thought of death, bare and sad like the outside of a prison. Flocks of jackdaws fly around, calling their short loud cries, and they settle on the roof along with a row of mystical birds. The Northern sun whitens the edifice with its pale light, the Netherlands’ misty horizon covering it with its bright lines. From the top of the tower, one can perceive from afar the ocean’s tides. And, in a natural way, this scene inspires poetic sentiments and plunges its spectator into deep meditations. For any Dutch art lover, the picturesque town of Bruges is full of marvelous surprises. Even if its attractions cannot rival those of grander and more magnificent European towns, Bruges, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was the central and most important market of the cities of Hanse, home of merchant princes. Unfortunately, all this has changed; Bruges is no longer classified as an area of wealth and commercial importance. At one time houses were full of paintings by Memling and other great artists, which today are dispersed throughout the entire world. Bruges was only able to preserve a few pieces from its great masters.

      Near this pious retreat, under the bell tower’s shadow, looms another sanctuary that governs and protects the word of God. It carries the name of St John’s Hospital. We do not know during what period it was founded, but was already in existence in the twelfth century. Around the year 1397 the monks there adopted the Rule of Saint Augustine. Dedicated to their vows of easing human suffering, their first priority dictated that they only see people from Bruges and Maldeghem. Nuns also took their place at the bedsides of the suffering and murmured words of consolation. Although the building has since become a museum, it has changed little. It is Gothic in style, full of gables and tarasques – mythical beasts half dragon and half-fish – and admits light through ogee windows. The sick awaited the end of their hardships there, under the pointed-arch vaulting. A calm, covered courtyard, fresh lime blossoms, and a single pond where ducks dabbled, occupied the space between the sickrooms. A small number of convalescents rested in the fresh air on fine days, full of gentle and profound melancholy with past anguish left behind them, hope of full recovery enlivening them with its magic visions.

      Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man, c. 1472. Oil on oak panel, 35.3 × 25.7 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.

      It is at the heart of the hospital church (the buildings were separated during the nineteenth century) that the famous Shrine of Saint Ursula (Illustration 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), created in 1489, can be found, and where other masterpieces produced by Hans Memling shine. Carefully kept for more than five centuries, gleaming in all their primitive radiance, their grace suddenly enchants the traveler and transports him into an era that is no more. He finds himself on the current of the eternal river, floating far from our time into older generations and onto other monuments, onto a shore that humanity has always avoided. Morals, costumes, passions, and beliefs, forever frozen under the artist’s paintbrush, have found themselves transported into our modern age. A gentle and tender light illuminates the paintings, a profound silence reigns around the spectator; murmurs coming from outside serve to increase its poetic emotion: the wind sighs as it brushes against the crosses, swallows twitter as they skim over the rooftops, while the city rumbles from afar like a river through the mountains. In one’s mind, these noises mix together and, dominated by the genius of memory, we can maybe imagine that we hear again the voices of days gone by.

      – Why did these paintings belong to a hospice?

      This is an inescapable question that plagues art historians, who can not respond to it in a satisfactory manner. A fog which seems to have enveloped so many Flemish masters, has wrapped itself around Memling and has hidden almost all knowledge of his existence. An impenetrable mystery surrounds him: we understand and admire his talent, but we know almost nothing of his life; several vague traditions and a few dry notes make up his story. Even his name was the subject of dispute for a long time, and the correct spelling of his name was not established until the beginning of 1861.[1]

      Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man from the Lespinette Family, c. 1485–1490. Oil on wood, 30.1 × 22.3 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

      I. Memling’s Origins and Beginnings

      Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man Holding a Letter, c. 1475. Oil on wood, 35 × 26 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

      Far from linking itself to a unique movement, the art of northern Europe, on the periphery of the Italian quattrocento, progressed rapidly and constantly. If the work of certain artists seems to offer similarities, fundamental differences are nonetheless notable in the works of great masters of this period such as Jan Van Eyck (c. 1390–1441), Rogier Van der Weyden (c. 1399–1464), Hugo Van der Goes (c. 1440–1482) and Hans Memling (c. 1433–1494), each distinguishing himself in his own manner from the “Old School” or the “New School.” And if the Flemish fifteenth century can at times be perceived as a simple sketch for the full flowering of the seventeenth-century art of Rembrandt (1606–1669) or Vermeer (1632–1675), it is a no less unique and rich era. The last decades of this tumultuous period were particularly marked by artist migrations beyond the borders of the Netherlands, which, carrying the glory of Dutch art, also marked, in a sense, the end of the “Old School.” Hans Memling was one of these men. And among the great names mentioned, it is that of Hans Memling of which Bruges can be the most proud.

      However, a century after his death, the country that had been so rich in his works had been completely forgotten, so much and so well that in preparing his Book of Painters (Het Schilder-Boeck), a precious collection of Dutch and German biographies from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, published in 1604, Carel Van Mander (1548–1606) stated only that Hans Memling was a major master during his time, before the period of Pieter Pourbus (c. 1523–1584), that is, before 1540. According to Mander, Memling was born in the town of Bruges,[2] while Jean-Baptiste Descamps (1714–1791) thought him to be from Damme. However, one could never doubt that he was not of German origin. The consensus with which all authors and documents call him “master Hans”, suffices to prove this: Hans is the Teutonic form of the word Jean: in the Netherlands one says Jan, a monosyllable pronounced Yann, the English sound “j” being unknown in Germanic languages. There is a diminutive form Hanneken.[3] Marc Van Vaernewyck categorically affirms this elsewhere: “In Bruges,” he says, “not only the churches but specific buildings are decorated with paintings from master Hugues, from master Rogier and from Hans the German.”[4] If Bruges does not seem then to have been the hometown of renowned painters, its location, the quality of life it offered and the opportunity of the art market, nonetheless attracted a large number of artists over the course of the first half of the fifteenth century.

      The

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