Art: Memling

Seeing the glory of God in even the smallest created things, Flemish monks of the 15th Century used to make a point of it in such dissertations as On the Beauty of the Louse. Flemish painters, whose art was an outgrowth of manuscript illumination, showed the same reverence for the minuscule, became Europe’s most meticulous realists. “All this is very popular,” snorted Florentine Michelangelo. “The least artistic inteligence can find therein something that appeals to it … but it lacks rhythm and proportion. . . .” The artist who most nearly united Flemish delicacy and Italian power of composition was Hans Memling, who lived in Bruges in the second half of the 15th Century.

In the Municipal Arts Museum in Bruges last week King Leopold attended the opening of the year’s most important Belgian exhibition: 41 paintings by Memling, brought together from collections as widely separated as Lübeck and Cleveland. One of the few important Memlings not included was the Last Judgment altarpiece in Danzig Cathedral, unavailable because of “international tension.” About the finest thing in the exhibition was an altarpiece in nine panels (polyptych) from Lübeck, painted with an austere simplification of detail rare in Flemish art. Most famous of all, and best proof of “Master Hans’s” ability to handle crowded, minute composition, was his series of six panels on the life of St. Ursula from Bruges’ own ancient Hospital of St. John. According to legend, the artist might never have painted this challenge to the Italian rhythmists if he had not found sanctuary in the hospital as a wounded soldier during a Flemish rebellion against the Habsburg rule.