Hans Memling, Master Painter in Fifteenth-Century Bruges

Hans Memling was the leading painter in Bruges during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, receiving commissions from patrons in England, Germany and Italy as well as Flanders itself. For the Romantics of the nineteenth century, he ranked even above Jan van Eyck as the greatest of the Flemish primitives. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, his exalted reputation had declined sharply under the shadow of his presumed teacher, Rogier van der Weyden. In 1953, Panofsky labelled …