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particularly frustrating. Not all objects were illustrated; many entries had only sum-mary information and no discussion of the objects; dimensions were missing in a fewplaces; the formatting of shelf-marks for the many manuscripts from the BibliotecaEstense seems to have completely thrown the copy-editors and typesetters; andassorted typographical errors and inconsistencies only increased the reader’s frustra-tion. In addition, although there are some remarkably fine photographs of Ferraresearchitecture in the catalogue, other illustrations are of surprisingly low quality. All inall, the catalogue seems to have been assembled too quickly and not properly proof-read. The Ferrarese catalogue, in contrast, contains an illustration and full catalogueentry for practically every object, including many that were not actually exhibited –these latter helpfully indicated by asterisks against their titles. (A few items, relegatedto a page of ‘altre opere’, have only summary entries.) In addition, catalogue entriesfor the works that were only exhibited in Brussels were included at the end of thecatalogue. Although the catalogue was not perfect – some entries were frustratinglyreticent as to the objects’ relevance to the exhibition’s themes, and not all the illus-trations were of the quality one would wish – it was a marked improvement on themore slapdash Brussels catalogue, and will be a significant and useful publication ontwo centuries of Ferrarese art.

In short, the catalogues exemplified the exhibitions they documented. That inBrussels was larger, more ambitious, and much more concerned to connect paintingand literature with the other arts, but perhaps rushed in execution, certainly over-designed, and poorly served by its venue. The Ferrarese exhibition, although reducedin content and more traditional in its aims and organization, was much clearer andmore successfully installed. Whilst the connections between the works exhibited andthe court which was the exhibition’s ostensible subject may, on occasion, have beentenuous, the organizers of both exhibitions can only be praised for their ambitionand success in attempting to provide an overview of two centuries of Ferrarese artand court culture, and assembling the largest collections of Ferrarese art since the Ariostoexhibition of 1933 to do so. The exhibitions will stand as major monuments to thequality and sophistication of the culture of one of the most singular of Renaissancecourts.

Ashmolean Museum Rupert Shepherd203Original ArticleReviews of exhibitionsReviews of exhibitionsREVIEWS OF EXHIBITIONS

Das Geheimnis des Jan van Eyck: Die frühen niederländischen Zeichnungenund Gemälde in Dresden (The Mystery of Jan van Eyck: the Early NetherlandishDrawings and Paintings in Dresden). (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,Residenzschloss (Kupferstich-Kabinett), 13 August-31 October 2005). Catalogueedited by Thomas Ketelsen and Uta Neidhardt. Munich & Berlin: DeutscherKunstverlag, 2005. 264 pp., 365 illustrations, mostly colour. $39.90, ISBN:3422065660

Memling’s Portraits (Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 15 February-15 May2005; Bruges, Groeningemuseum, 7 June-4 September 2005; New York, The Frick

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Collection, 12 October-31 December 2005). Catalogue edited by Till-HolgerBorchert, with contributions by Maryan W. Ainsworth, Lorne Campbell, andPaula Nuttall. Ghent-Amsterdam: Ludion, 2005. 192 pp., 170 illustrations, 120colour. $40/30, ISBN: 90-5544-560-6 (hardcover), 90-5544-550-9 (paperback);also available in Dutch and French. Published in New York and London byThames & Hudson, some with the title Memling and the Art of Portraiture, $45/£29.95, ISBN: 0500093261 (hardback)

The Mystery of Jan van Eyck displayed for the first time all of the early Netherlandishdrawings and paintings in the Dresden state collections, with Van Eyck’s 1431 DresdenTriptych and preliminary drawing and painting of the Portrait of an Old Man (NiccolòAlbergati?) (hereinafter referred to as ‘Albergati’) as its highlights. As originallyplanned before its postponement by the 2002 Dresden flooding, the exhibition wouldhave followed two major early Netherlandish exhibitions of that year, The Age of VanEyck in Bruges and Early Netherlandish Drawings from Jan van Eyck to Hieronymus Boschin Antwerp. As rescheduled for 2005, it coincided with another significant exhibition,Memling’s Portraits, which brought together an unprecedented number of paintedportraits by Van Eyck’s most important successor in Bruges.

Other than Van Eyck’s ‘Albergati’ drawing and Dresden Triptych, Dresden’s is not oneof the better-known collections for early Netherlandish art. Most of its holdings areby anonymous artists and date from well after Van Eyck’s death in 1441, but theexhibition revealed the collection’s full extent, particularly the relatively large numberof drawings, and in the process explored issues of subject matter, function, andmaking. For the most part the paintings and drawings were hung separately, but theexhibition also examined the interrelations between them, as well as the role oftechnical studies in helping to unravel their ‘mysteries’. The approach differed fromthe 2002 Antwerp loan exhibition, which brought together many of the most refinedextant drawings (though not including ‘Albergati’) and grouped the works into schoolsup to the era of Bosch; the great majority depicted religious subjects or the occasionalportrait and were models for or after paintings, thereby highlighting how revolutionaryHieronymus Bosch was at the turn of the sixteenth century in broadening the subjectmatter, style, and function of drawings.1 Dresden, in contrast, owns relatively few worksprior to c. 1480, and it is probably for that reason that its drawings appear strikinglydiverse. Accordingly, rather than focus on attribution or chronological development,the exhibition took a thematic approach.

Close to half of Dresden’s sixty-five drawings do follow the most common earlyNetherlandish repertoire of portraits (cat. 11, 13–15) or religious subjects derivedfrom painting or prints (cat. 16–31, 33, 43–50), and all of its fourteen paintings aresimilarly either devotional/liturgical (cat. 67–76) or portraits (cat. 77–80). But itsdrawings also include plans for tombs (cat. 9–10); sketches of secular or Old Testa-ment scenes for tapestries or manuscript illumination or stained glass (cat. 1–6,51–61); drapery and figure studies (cat. 40–42, 62–66); and fantastical creatures (cat. 32,34–38). Relatively few non-religious Netherlandish drawings survive before the late

1 Fritz Koreny, ‘Introduction: Netherlandish drawings of the 15th century’, in Fritz Koreny, Early NetherlandishDrawings from Jan van Eyck to Hieronymus Bosch (Antwerp: Rubenshuis, 2002), 10–20.

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fifteenth century, even though a high proportion of tapestries, wall paintings andbook illustrations were of secular subjects even in the fourteenth century, so it wasparticularly exciting to see one of the rare exceptions, a unique c. 1420/30 series of fiveplanetary deities (cat. 1–3) that were probably studies for manuscript illumination.2

The exhibition further included two previously unpublished manuscript illumina-tions from a Book of Hours by Lieven van Lathem and the Master of the DresdenPrayerbook (cat. 7–8), which were particularly interesting to compare withthe miniaturist style of Van Eyck’s Dresden Triptych. A relatively high proportion of thecollection’s drawings are by or close to the early sixteenth-century artist known as theAbsalom Master or Master of the Death of Absalom, who produced numerous designsfor glass roundels (cat. 34–39, 55–66). The exhibition also highlighted the often-neglected sketches or fragments sometimes found on reverses, most memorably ascatological drawing of a woman’s face as male genitalia on the back of a Virgin andChild in an interior (cat. 31).

In a section of the exhibition focusing on technical studies, a video showing amodern re-creation of a triptych by the Master of the St Ursula Legend (cat. 70) gavevaluable insight into the complex process of creating panel paintings, from thepreparation of the wood to the underdrawing to the final painting layers. Nearby,discoveries about some of the paintings’ underdrawings were highlighted: in theaforementioned triptych, for example, the smooth, confident style of the Virgin andsaints contrasts with the rougher underdrawing of the donor figure, suggesting thatthe artist worked out the portrait directly on the panel, inserted into a pre-establishedcomposition. In the case of a c. 1520 Deposition in the Campin tradition (cat. 74),infrared reflectography has revealed a system of grids that the artist used to transferthe composition from a separate (lost) drawing. The visual appearance and uses ofdifferent types of drawing materials were also explained here – the collection’sdrawings are diverse in material and function as well as subject matter – as were thetechniques such as x-ray fluorescence analysis that can help identify the precisecomposition of such materials. As more and more early Netherlandish drawings aresubjected to this analysis, the resulting body of knowledge may yield patterns that willhelp us identify or date them. Much of this material and more appears in the cata-logue’s various essays, though they are illustrated mainly with small details that areless informative than the larger and fuller reproductions hung in the exhibition.Moreover, while the exhibition meant to demonstrate the importance of technicalstudies for helping us understand the works themselves, the fact that the two weredisplayed so far apart – most of the paintings were literally at the opposite end of theshow – reinforced the impression that a gap still remains between art and science.

The exhibition openly acknowledged that no amount of technical study can really‘explain’ artworks like Van Eyck’s. Among the mostly anonymous works in the exhi-bition, the three by him understandably took pride of place. It seems fitting that thesmall Dresden Triptych (cat. 67), usually housed in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister inthe Zwinger, was here displayed in the nearby Residenzschloss above the partially

2 Another rare survival is a mid-fifteenth century series in Berlin depicting the story of the Golden Fleece,Stephanie Buck, Die niederländischen Zeichnungen des 15. Jahrhunderts im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett: KritischerKatalog (Turnhout, 2001), cat. 1.2.

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re-installed Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault), which most visitors to the exhibition wouldhave seen on a combined ticket. Like its predecessors from the fifteenth-centuryBurgundian court, this remarkable Saxon treasury of mostly Renaissance and Baroquedecorative objects delights in the re-working of costly materials like gold, silver, ivory,coral, and gems, often on a miniaturized scale. Van Eyck’s Dresden Triptych would notlook out of place among them: it achieves similar effects of preciousness, though withconsiderably less expensive materials. The trompe-l’oeil inscriptions running aroundthe inner frames further recall costly metalwork, and Van Eyck went so far as to depictthe central panel’s inscription as if in raised letters, while the side panel inscriptionsappear incised, though both are merely an illusion of paint. The outer wings furtherplay on imitative materials with their grisaille Annunciation of ivory or alabaster-likestatuettes of Gabriel and Mary, set in niches framed by imitation marble, thoughadmittedly the figures’ illusionism is slightly less persuasive than in Van Eyck’s similarAnnunciation diptych in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. Still, despite its diminutivesize, the impact of this triptych is immense, particularly when as well displayed as itwas here.

There was not a great deal of accompanying discussion of the painting within theexhibition itself, but the catalogue provides a summary of the triptych’s history andthe results of technical studies, concentrating particularly on the underdrawingrather than the painting materials. An intriguing short essay by Patrick Seurink, basedon his PhD thesis at Ghent University, observes among other things that the measure-ments of the three panels and their frames, taking into account the division of thecentral panel into three parts by the hanging canopy, sets up a horizontal rhythm of3-7-6-7-6-7-6-7-3, which reinforces how carefully Van Eyck constructed the triptych.While he may not have used or been interested in single-point perspective, he didevidently use geometry in working out certain parts of the design. How much inputthe patron may have had into the composition cannot be deduced, particularly as thedonor figure has not been identified, though one of the damaged coats of arms onthe frame is similar to that of the Giustiniani family (the catalogue is cautious on thispoint). Uta Neidhardt and Christoph Schölzel note the patron figure’s strikingsimilarity to St Francis in the Eyckian panels of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata inTurin and Philadelphia, whose raised open hands similarly express an immediateresponse to an intense religious experience.

The subject of the other two Van Eycks, the silverpoint drawing of ‘Albergati’ andits concomitant portrait borrowed from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (cat. 11–12), also remains unknown. His traditional identification as Cardinal Niccolò Alber-gati, based on seventeenth-century reports that the portrait depicted the Cardinal ofSanta Croce, seems doubtful given his layman’s clothing and hairstyle – Albergatireputedly followed the regulations of his Carthusian order scrupulously – though noalternative has so far been widely accepted. Whoever he was, his commission fromVan Eyck is today especially important in that it is the only early Netherlandishportrait that can be matched with a preliminary drawing, which is in turn the onlyabsolutely securely attributable fifteenth-century Netherlandish drawing we know of.The drawing rivals the Dresden Triptych in impressiveness, though in different ways: theman’s face seems to emerge ghost-like out of the page, more embedded within it thandrawn onto it. Other commentators have remarked on its relatively non-linear quality,

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and that came through with particular power in this exhibition. While almost all of theother drawings were far more graphic in style, Van Eyck achieved remarkably delicatemodelling through masses of parallel hatching whose individual strokes can hardly bedistinguished. Even more than is usually the case, reproductions can never fully capturethe subtlety of this work, though the catalogue’s illustration is easily the best I have seen.

It was particularly valuable to be able to compare the drawing with its painting,although the decision to hang them on opposite walls rather than side by side madethis unduly difficult. (It would also have been helpful to reproduce the drawing andpainting in proportion to each other somewhere in the catalogue, as the excellentlarge side-by-side illustrations on pp. 64–65, not to mention the clever titlepagemorphing one into the other, make it difficult to visualize the size difference betweenthem.) The room further displayed a helpful large-text translation of the detailedcolour indications Van Eyck noted to the left of the head, though the placementagain made it hard to compare this text directly with the painting. In any case thewords, while intriguing, hardly clarify Van Eyck’s use of colours. Part of what makeshis work so staggering is that every minute bit of his paint appears infinitely varied,and that is certainly the case for the old man’s skin, so phrases like ‘the lips verywhitish purple’ could only have been a prompt at best. Despite the subtle colouring,however, to my eye the painting oddly has an almost more graphic quality than thedrawing, particularly in the face. Perhaps that is because Van Eyck relied exclusivelyon the drawing to create the painting, whereas it may have been more commonpractice to conduct a series of sittings to build up a likeness on the panel; perhaps itis also because when viewed up close, much of the underdrawing shows through inthe face, most obviously in the changed lip line.

The relationship between drawing and painting has been clarified by two impor-tant recent discoveries.3 One is that Van Eyck used at least three different metalpointsin his drawing: virtually pure silver for the face and its modelling, silver mixed with24% copper for the broader hatching beside the head, and gold with some silver forreinforcing certain parts like the pupils and cheek modelling, and for writing theinscriptions (those at top and bottom have yet to be deciphered). The researcherssurmise that Van Eyck chose his metalpoints both for their colour and their relativehardness, adapting his materials to the effects he wanted to achieve in differentsections. The other key discovery is that a 40x microscope revealed tiny pierces in thepaper at five points: the bottom of the ear, the facial contour near the right eye, apoint on the chin, and the ends of the mouth. Since the height of the head in thepainting is about 40% greater than in the drawing – close to the proportion of thesquare root of two to one, or the ratio of the hypotenuse to each side of a 90-degreeisosceles triangle – the researchers suggest that Van Eyck used perpendicular linesand a compass to mechanically enlarge the drawing to the painting’s underdrawing,setting out the key points and major lines using the compass and then working outthe rest by eye. This was not simply a mechanical process: Van Eyck was evidentlydissatisfied with the breadth of the head and the placement of the man’s ear, becausein the portrait’s underdrawing he drew it significantly farther out from the face than

3 See also Thomas Ketelsen, Ina Reiche, Olaf Simon, and Silke Merchel, ‘New information on Jan vanEyck’s portrait drawing in Dresden’, Burlington Magazine, 147 no. 1224 (March 2005), 170–75.

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in the preliminary drawing, and finally in the painting stages he changed it again toa medium position, so it took three tries before he found where he wanted it.

Such groping for the ideal solution is also found in many portraits by Hans Memling,an artist of German origins who moved to Bruges in 1465, probably after training withRogier van der Weyden in Brussels. He worked in Bruges for the rest of his life, almostthirty years, and quickly became the major portraitist of his generation. Like Van Eyck,a high proportion of his surviving works are independent portraits, whereas otherwell-known artists of the later fifteenth century (Dirk Bouts, Hugo van der Goes, GerardDavid) left very few, though donor portraits within altarpieces or devotional workswere more common. Of the thirty or so Memling portraits that survive today, abouttwenty were shown in the Bruges and New York showings of Memling’s Portraits, whiletwelve were seen in Madrid; the full catalogue includes twenty-eight works altogether.

Memling painted both independent portraits and devotional portrait diptychs ortriptychs, in which a man or couple are conjoined with a religious image, usually theVirgin and Child, though unfortunately almost none of these survive intact. Thedevotional portrait was first popularized by Rogier van der Weyden, from whomMemling no doubt inherited it (none by Van Eyck are known), but he extended thegenre in works like the Diptych of Maarten van Nieuwenhove (cat. 23), in which thefigures of both panels are set into a single domestic interior united by their reflectionin an Eyckian mirror behind the Virgin. (A similar though damaged and less well-known diptych is in Chicago). This relates to Memling’s most important achievement,his development of landscape, sometimes seen from a parapet, as an alternative tothe single-field-of-colour background found in all the extant portrait panels by VanEyck, Van der Weyden, and Robert Campin. Van der Weyden set a precedent in hisBraque Triptych in Paris, in which half-length figures of Christ flanked by saints aresilhouetted against a distant landscape, and Petrus Christus and Dirk Bouts bothpainted portraits set in interiors, sometimes with bits of landscape visible from awindow. But Memling set the international fashion for landscape portraits, particu-larly among the foreign merchants living in Bruges. Until recently it was thought thathe borrowed the idea from Italian art through his patrons, but the reverse influencewas in fact probably more important, though as Paula Nuttall explains in her cata-logue essay the demand from Italian patrons may have stimulated this developmentin Memling’s work. Many of his portraits do still have single-colour backgrounds,so he offered both options to his patrons, who chose their preference by price oraesthetics. The old couple whose separated portraits are now in New York and Houston(cat. 9) may have chosen a plain background for the sake of economy, but themiddle-aged Anthony of Burgundy surely requested it for its visual effects. (Hisportrait by Memling survives only in two copies, one of which is owned by Dresdenand was in the Van Eyck exhibition, cat. 77).

In Madrid the exhibition was relatively small, in a single room on the ground floor,and incorporated into the Thyssen-Bornemisza’s ‘Contexts of the Permanent Collec-tion’ series. In Bruges, on which this review is mostly based, and in New York it wasa bigger affair, though the selection of paintings differed in each case. In Bruges afirst room showed slides and information about the artist’s life, then the exhibitionproper began with several portraits by some of Memling’s predecessors and contem-poraries, including the Courtauld Institute’s Guillaume Fillastre attributed to Van der

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Weyden’s workshop, the Thyssen version of Campin’s Portrait of a Stout Man, and twoof Van Eyck’s most captivating portraits, Margaret van Eyck owned by the Groeninge-museum and Jan de Leeuw on loan from Vienna. Memling borrowed many ideas fromsuch precedents: the relatively small size; the usual inclusion of head and shouldersonly, though occasionally closer to half-length; the hands popping up at the bottomof the frame resting on a ledge, holding an attribute, fingering an item of clothing,or praying; the body and face turned in varying degrees towards three-quarters; andthe sitter usually gazing off to the side, or (very rarely) directly at the viewer. OtherNetherlandish portraitists also followed these parameters, but none in Memling’s daymatched his technical proficiency or developed such an extensive repertoire of vari-ations within the theme. Although he probably learned most about portraiture fromVan der Weyden, Memling rejected some of his master’s stylized elegance in favourof Van Eyck’s attention to detail. A panel by Petrus Christus’ workshop depicting akneeling Isabella of Portugal with St Elizabeth of Hungary served as a minor exemplarof donor portraiture, but the room mostly focused on independent single portraits,as the selection of Memlings also tended to do, though not exclusively. Van Eyck’slarge Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele was unfortunately left in its usual placein the room before the exhibition began, where it is difficult to see properly becauseits protective glass reflects too much light (incidentally, this was also a problem forthe Nieuwenhove Diptych in the Madrid showing). It seemed a missed opportunity thatthis seminal work was not integrated into the exhibition, as it undoubtedly influencedMemling’s variations on the enthroned Virgin and Child, most obviously his St JohnAltarpiece, and surely affected his conception of donor/devotional portraiture as well.

After the comparative portraits, Memling’s own paintings were in the next tworooms, where they were stunningly displayed against dark-painted walls and spotlitfrom below in individual glass cases, like cult images in a dim church. (In Madridthey were simply hung against white walls under more uniform lighting, which madefor good viewing though a less awe-inducing atmosphere.) The cases must have beenexpensive but they were well worth it, as they highlighted the skin tones beautifullyand allowed very close viewing without any interfering reflections, essential for suchsmall works of very high quality. It was immediately evident that the surface details ofMemling’s portraits, like Van Eyck’s, are vital to their overall impression, so thatdamaged panels like the abraded Man with a Pink in Vicenza (cat. 27) are extremelydifficult to judge because the essence of the original has been lost. (That is also trueof the Van der Weydenish Guillaume Fillastre.) While some of the paintings were wellknown, others were discoveries from relatively inaccessible collections, and the beau-tiful Pierpont Morgan Library Man with a Pink (cat. 20) has until recently languishedin a dark corner, marred by discoloured varnish. The best of Memling’s portraitsreward long scrutiny through their attention to detail combined with a satisfyingoverall composition, a measured balance between individuality and design. An Italiancopy of Man with a Letter (cat. 11, fig. 63), though hung slightly too far away from itsoriginal, underlined what the Italians admired in Memling but could not quitereplicate: it is a decent reproduction but fails to capture his refinement in the facialdetail or the atmospheric recession at the horizon.

Almost every work was a feast for the eye, a good thing since the exhibition wasdisconcertingly unsigned. I, and a colleague with whom I visited, made the mistake

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of not getting the audio guide, which explained the layout (if confusingly) andprovided the only information about the individual works of art.4 Although some ofthe publicity material claimed that the Bruges showing would emphasize the role ofpatronage in donor portraiture, that was not especially apparent, though a final smallroom did display documents about the colourful life of Anne Willemszoon, motherof the Cistercian abbot Jan Crabbe who commissioned one of Memling’s earliesttriptychs, the panels of which are now dispersed between Vicenza, New York, and Bruges.The exhibition also paid relatively little attention to technical themes compared withthe Dresden show, though the audio guide did explain technical aspects of someindividual paintings. A more synthetic overview can be found in Maryan Ainsworth’scatalogue essay on the development of Memling’s painting technique, which hasbeen surprisingly little studied so far. Though more evaluation of individual paintingsremains to be done, she argues from the evidence so far that he evolved from adetailed, smooth style early on to a more summary and economic technique in hislater works (the same evolution can be found in the underdrawings of his religiouspaintings), and she reproduces a number of excellent enlarged details to support hercase. Concomitantly, Memling also changed the way that he used lead white in hispigments, from highlights in earlier works to a broader application in later ones.5 Thecurators have used such information to help in their approximate dating of theworks, distributing them around the few that retain their original frames with the yearof completion inscribed.

In general the exhibition was less overtly thematic than the Dresden one, but forme the portraits did raise a number of broadly interrelated issues, which as it happensalso apply to Van Eyck: the significance of the sitters’ identity, the distinction between‘secular’ and devotional/donor portraits, the degree of individualization. In Dresdenwe cannot name either man portrayed by Van Eyck, but we can identify about two-thirdsof his sitters altogether, usually because he recorded their names in inscriptions. WithMemling the proportion is far smaller, though some others can be tentatively identi-fied as either foreign or native on the basis of their appearance. In broad terms,knowing the background and social status of sitters can reveal important patterns inan artist’s patronage: Van Eyck’s patrons were predominantly from the urban eliterather than the nobility, despite the fact that he held a court position, and theyincluded a significant number of Italians (Arnolfini, Lomellini, Adornes); in the caseof Memling, we can infer that foreign patrons, particularly Italians, were prevalentthroughout his career and were most essential towards the beginning, when he alsoconcentrated most heavily on portraiture. Till-Holger Borchert’s catalogue essay, ahelpful overview of Memling’s career, emphasizes the importance of his Last Judgmenttriptych now in Gdansk, painted in the late 1460s for Angelo Tani, then representa-tive of the Medici bank in Bruges. It includes donor portraits of Tani and his wife onthe outer wings, while a portrait head of Tani’s successor at the bank, Tommaso

4 My thanks to Stephen Hanley for explaining what I missed, and for his reflections on the exhibition.5 Although I was persuaded by the overall argument, I found it difficult to see why Figs. 101 and 102, x-

rays of Tommaso Portinari and the Pierpont Morgan Man with a Pink respectively, are supposedly so differentfrom each other; the distribution of lead white in the x-ray of Maarten van Nieuwenhove, Fig. 103, looked tome far more different from both of these, rather than similar to Man with a Pink. Perhaps Ainsworth’sinterpretation would be more evident to a technical specialist.

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Portinari, was added onto the soul being favourably weighed by St Michael. PaulaNuttall has suggested that further figures among the saved may also be disguisedportraits of Italian merchants.6 Borchert argues that the altarpiece was probably visi-ble in Memling’s workshop for several years and attracted further patronage amongItalian merchants in Bruges, who got their portraits into Tani’s altarpiece as a bonus.(It could also be that Memling merely found it useful to have a group of head typesat hand.) As he became better known, a higher proportion of native burgherscommissioned works from him, and in the 1480s Bruges patricians like Nieuwenhoveand Willem Moreel with his wife Barbara van Vlaenderberch became particularlyimportant, when the city’s rebellion against Maximilian of Austria led to the temporarydisplacement of foreign merchants.

But how often does it, or would it, matter if we could name the person represented?In some cases we feel that knowing a sitter tells us a lot about the work, mostly whenwe happen to know a lot about the person and/or the work in question is distinctive,as in Van Eyck’s Madonna with Chancellor Nicholas Rolin in Paris or his Man in a RedTurban in London, which is probably (though not indisputably) a self-portrait. TheRolin panel seems revealing primarily because of his unusually close relationship tothe Virgin and Child within the palatial setting, and because we know from infraredreflectography that Van Eyck omitted an intended purse hanging at his side. Puttogether with contemporary descriptions and documents about Rolin, scholarsgenerally perceive his panel as an expression of his wealth and status filtered throughostensible piety. How much of that is due to the painting itself and how much to ourcontextual knowledge about Rolin may be debateable. With Memling, as anotherexample, the catalogue’s suggestion that the Antwerp Man with a Coin (cat. 10) couldbe the Venetian humanist Bernardo Bembo would be highly significant, as he prob-ably commissioned Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in Washington,so the latter’s landscape background – an early forerunner of the Mona Lisa – couldhave been directly inspired by Memling’s precedent.

Such benefits of identifying a sitter, however, tend to be rather different than wewould like. We want to know whom portraits represent, because we desire to matchthe individual being that we perceive to a recorded human person. What we actuallygain is usually much more prosaic: some understanding of what sorts of peoplecommissioned what types of portraits from which artists. It is useful to know thatMaarten van Nieuwenhove was the young scion of a leading Bruges family becausehis devotional portrait is the most ostentatious of those that survive from Memling (afact that I had not fully appreciated before seeing so many in the same place). Butwe do not really learn very much about him from Memling’s portrait, or at best whatwe infer, like Rolin, arises through his desire to be shown in the same interior spaceas the Virgin and Child. As Lorne Campbell’s catalogue essay points out, we wouldhardly imagine the ribald character of Canon Gilles Joye just by looking at his prayingportrait (cat. 3), nor would we guess anything about the dramatic experiences ofAnne Willemszoon (kidnapped and forced to remarry at an advanced age) from herdonor portrait in her son’s triptych – nor, for that matter, do we really perceive her

6 Paula Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400–1500 (New Haven &London), 59–60.

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portrait very differently after learning that information. It is almost always an illusionto think that we learn about someone’s character by seeing their face, though thathas not so far prevented people from trying.

This fundamental human tendency lies at the heart of why fifteenth-century Euro-peans commissioned portraits, and why we are still interested in them: they wantedthemselves to be captured and recorded, and we want to find out what they were like.If a portrait leaves itself open to a great deal of reading-into, all the better. This musthave a lot to do with why Van Eyck and Memling were so successful as portraitists. Byrecording so much evident detail about individual appearance, they imply that theirportraits reproduce the person depicted; at the same time, they in truth reveal ratherlittle, particularly because they have very little facial expression, which allows us toread almost anything we want into them. (My colleague at the Memling exhibitionrepeatedly invented more interesting titles for his many unknown sitters – ‘Man withinsufficient funds’, ‘Teacher’s pet’.) Northern portraits operated by focusing on exteriordescription slotted into an appropriate context, and the best of them allow theirviewers to apply the same speculative interpretation of the human face as they wouldapply to a real person.

This relates to another theme in Van Eyck’s and Memling’s portraiture, the relativeindistinguishability between ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ portraits. The Memling exhibitionfocused primarily on his independent portraits, though three works among the fullcatalogue portray kneeling donors (cat. 4, 14, 22), and of the remaining twenty-threeworks attributable to Memling himself (excluding cat. 19 and 28, probably by follow-ers), six were from devotional diptychs/triptychs or at least showed the sitter(s) inprayer (cat. 3, 18, 21, 23, 25, 26). As others have commented, however, the only realdistinction between them is the presence or absence of praying hands. Their notespecially devout appearance is not merely because most are now separated fromtheir accompanying religious image. Only Nieuwenhove, who happens to still bepaired with his Virgin, and the unknown female donor figure from the BrukenthalMuseum in Romania (cat. 14), a fragment from a larger work, seem engaged in somekind of inner experience because of their slightly parted lips; the others might as wellbe holding a flower rather than joining their hands in prayer. This is just as true ofVan Eyck, whose few donor portraits (the Dresden Triptych patron, Rolin, Van derPaele, and Joos Vijd/Elisabeth Borluut from the Ghent Altarpiece) are not any more ordifferently emotive than his other sitters, despite the fact that their postures and handgestures signal piety.

Portraits at that time did not generally aim to capture the particular emotions of amoment, as they served their function of recording human essence better by remain-ing as neutral as possible. In Memling’s case, the result tends to be an impression ofimpervious blankness. Van Eyck, on the other hand, has usually left his viewersfeeling that he has captured more of the inner person, however elusive they mayultimately be. Quite how he achieves this effect is difficult to pinpoint – part of his‘mystery’ – but it seems to me that the decrease in Memling goes along with his shiftto landscape backgrounds. The Memlings that in my view come closest to Van Eyck’smysterious essence have plain backgrounds, like the Windsor Man with a Gold Cord(cat. 12), the Washington Man with an Arrow (cat. 13), and the Pierpont Morgan Manwith a Pink (cat. 20). Blank backgrounds direct all emphasis to the sitters in themselves,

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implying that the image reproduces them as essential beings; to place a person in asetting, even an idealized or imagined one, contextualizes them and turns the imagemore into a potential memento of time or place–which is presumably what theforeign sitters in particular, temporary residents in the north, were looking for.

The inner person seems most absent from Memling’s images of young women andchildren, who, like his young virgin saints, tend to be generalized and vacuous. Thatdoes not mean they lose their appeal, rather that the nature of the appeal is ratherdifferent than for his men and older women. I was particularly struck in the exhibitionby the contrast between his two portraits of Barbara van Vlaenderberch, one for abust-length devotional triptych (cat. 18), the other a donor portrait on the rightinside wing of the large Moreel Triptych altarpiece (cat. 22), which were displayed closeto each other in the Bruges showing. The altarpiece is dated 1484, and the devotionaltriptych has usually been dated at around the same time, though in his catalogue ofMemling’s paintings Dirk de Vos suggested that it was painted c. 1472–75, since WillemMoreel looks considerably older in the altarpiece and the technique is different.7 Thecurrent exhibition reverts to the later dating of c. 1480, arguing that the two sets ofportraits are based on the same model and that the differences in appearance andtechnique result from the different requirements of devotional panels designed to beviewed up close and a large-scale altarpiece seen from a greater distance. That maybe true, though it does not seem improbable that Memling could have painted thedevotional panels several years earlier and then re-used his old portrait drawings as atemplate for the new ones – in fact that is the type of procedure, according toAinsworth’s catalogue essay, that Memling tended to follow, starting off with basictemplates that were then individualized for each sitter. De Vos’ enlarged detail ofWillem’s face on p. 242 of his catalogue reinforces how strikingly older he looks inthe altarpiece than in the devotional triptych: the lines around his eyes and mouthare much more emphasized, his hair is greyer, and the dimple on his chin hasvanished. Perhaps he simply wished to look younger in the image he would look atmore closely on a regular basis. What is most remarkable, however, is the contrarychange in Barbara: she looks like a real person, even if idealized, in the individualportrait, whereas in the altarpiece she has become entirely generic (her daughters,too, all look more or less identical); perhaps it was a form of public flattery, or justan artistic shorthand. The two faces may derive from the same template, but the smalldifferences make all the difference. No wonder few portraitists could rise to VanEyck’s and Memling’s level, given how slight the differences may be between two facesthat nevertheless appear completely different, such is our sensitivity to the nuancesof the human face.

Campbell’s catalogue essay gives some explanation as to why Memling’s donorportraits might sometimes look different than the individual panels. He argues thatMemling tended to enlarge faces at the expense of crania, i.e. the features are stretchedout and foreheads are too small. He overstates the case – a quick look around acrowded room should confirm that not everyone’s eyes are really midway betweenchin and top of the head, which Campbell presents as an absolute rule of nature fromwhich Memling deviates – but it is nevertheless an important insight. He further

7 Dirk de Vos, Hans Memling: The Complete Works (London, 1994), 131.

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argues that Memling usually used more ‘accurate’ facial proportions for his saints(which I suspect is related to the fashion among young women for high foreheads),so when he painted kneeling donors in front of their patron saints he shifted theirhead anatomy in a more ‘realistic’ direction to match, though he sees the Moreel Triptychas an exception. It is a perceptive and interesting argument, and seems to apply insome cases, but certainly not consistently; if the reasoning were correct I am unsurewhy the same shift would not also occur in devotional diptychs and triptychs, wheresurely the disjunction between the Virgin and her human devotees should be evenmore apparent. Unfortunately none of Memling’s drawings survive, so it is difficultto recreate his process of working, but it is perhaps instructive to note as a compari-son that Van Eyck enlarged the ‘Albergati’ man’s forehead when he made the shiftfrom drawing to painting. Was that because he had artificially reduced it in thedrawing and wanted to correct himself, or because he thought a higher foreheadthan the man actually had gave a better impression?

Those who had the fortune to visit both of these exhibitions will likely have foundtheir complementary themes a stimulation to new ideas. Those who missed one orboth will have to settle for the catalogues, a not insignificant compensation, thoughDas Geheimnis des Jan van Eyck will undoubtedly remain a much more specialized titlethan Memling’s Portraits (or Memling and the Art of Portraiture, as some editions aremore grandly called). In fact the latter seems more designed for its textual legacythan as an accompaniment to the staged exhibition, given its failure to state whichMemlings were shown where, or to catalogue (or even list) the comparative worksexhibited at each location. But that will no doubt be overlooked by the generalpublic, and forgiven by specialists.

University of York Jeanne Nuechterlein