Madonna and Child
by HANS MEMLING (Flemish School)
EARLY Flemish painting was the direct offspring of the Gothic miniatures
sacred manuscripts, missals, and Books of Hours illuminated by the monks
-and notwithstanding its rapid advancement in color and craftsmanship,
retained the stamp of the miniature until Rubens returned from Italy in the
seventeenth century.
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Continuing the medieval tradition, it was naturally of a
religious character, and remained so throughout its entire development. The
Renaissance, striking at the roots of the medieval order, destroyed Christianity
in Italian art, but in the north countries revived it.
The early Flemings found
no incompatibility between their homely pieties and the teachings of Christ;
no irreconcilable differences between their matter-of-fact sensuality and the
principles of the Roman Church.
The indigenous flavor of the early school, which was carried to its height by
the Van Eycks, was maintained by Robert Campin, Rogier van del’ Weyden,
Petrus Christus, and Hans Memling, the last,
by reason of the appealing deli
cacy of his portraits and the quaint, medieval tenderness of his religious pieces,
being one of the most cherished artists of hi~ time. Memling, a German by
birth, spent the better part of his working life at Bruges, where his pictures are
lavishly displayed today. He was a craftsman of the first order,
refining the
hard surfaces of his school with the precise, gentle touch and the bright colors
of the illuminators of sacred texts. Emotionally he was a man of a single mood;
in design he was an artist of a single pose.
The finest and maturest of Memling’s Virgins, and III truth, the whole of his
religious spirit, is exemplified in the Bruges picture known as the Nieuioen
hoven Madonna, from the donor whose portrait adorns the other wing of the
diptych.
The figures were stationed and proportioned in the picture space with
mathematical care, and the Virgin, in pose and expression, resembles all his
others. She sits bolt upright, the head elongated, the forehead high, and the
eyes downcast. The picture is characteristic of the artist’s modesty and charm:
there is never a hint of tragedy or suffering in his art-he was a man of reti
cence and unaffected shyness.
In Memling’s religious paintings the delicacy
of feeling and tenderness of expression are genuine qualities; but his concep
tions, promoted by his successors, were overladen with sweetness and senti
mentality.
