_Hans Memlinc_ (Early Flemish: 1430-1494).
It is only in the Hospital of St. John at Bruges that the art
of this exquisite painter can be properly studied. There,
as among the Fra Angelicos at San Marco in Florence and the
Giottos at the Arena in Padua, one may see the great works
of a mediæval painter in the very surroundings which first
produced them. (Copies of some of Memlinc's works at Bruges and
elsewhere are included in the Arundel Society's collection.)
The Hospital is, as it were, a shrine of Memlinc. Around this
fact legends grew. In one of the pictures, it was said, a
portrait of the artist might be discovered; on the sculptured
ornaments of a porch enframing one of its subjects, an incident
of the master's life might be traced,--his danger as he lay
senseless in the street, his rescue as charitable people
carried his body to the hospital. It came to be told how the
great artist began life as a soldier who went to the wars
under Charles the Bold, and came back riddled with wounds from
the field of Nancy. Wandering homeward in a disabled state in
1477, he fainted in the streets of Bruges, and was cured by
the Hospitallers. Unknown to them and a stranger to Bruges, he
gave tangible proofs of his skill to the brethren of St. John,
and showed his gratitude by refusing payment for a picture he
had painted. Unfortunately all this is a myth. Of his real life
little is known, but it is enough to refute the legends that
for so long passed current. In 1477 he was under contract to
furnish an altar-piece for the guild chapel of the booksellers
of Bruges; this picture, preserved under the name of the "Seven
Griefs of Mary," is now one of the principal treasures of the
Gallery of Turin. His many pictures for the Hospitallers were
painted in 1479 and 1480. He was born at Mayence on the Rhine.
His name (which should not be spelt Memling) was probably
derived from the town of Memmelinck (now Medenblik) in the
north-east of Holland, to which place his family presumably
belonged. He is known from the town records to have been
settled in Bruges in his own house in 1479. He must have been
a citizen of some wealth, for in the next year he was one of
those who contributed to a loan raised by Maximilian of Austria
to push hostilities against France. In 1487 he lost his wife.
In 1494 he died, his children being still minors, and was
buried in the Church of St. Giles (see a document cited in the
_Athenæum_ of 2nd February 1889).
This is all that documentary evidence has disclosed about
Memlinc's life. If the evidence of his pictures may be taken,
his life must have been gentle and peaceful. For Memlinc's
place in the history of art is among the leaders of the
"Purist" School (see under 663). He was, we may say, the
Fra Angelico of Flanders. In technique he used the methods
perfected by the Van Eycks. "In drawing a comparison between
Memlinc and his predecessors and contemporaries,[165] he
is found inferior to John Van Eyck in power of colour and
chiaroscuro, as well as in searching portraiture; to Van der
Weyden in dramatic force; to Dierick Bouts and Gheeraert
David in beauty and finish of landscape" (Weale's monograph
on Memlinc, published by the Arundel Society). But Memlinc
had a sentiment and an ideal of his own to which none of his
Flemish contemporaries attained. "Van Eyck saw with his eye,
Memlinc begins to see with his spirit. The one copied and
imitated; the other copies, imitates,--and transfigures. Van
Eyck, without any thought of an ideal, reproduced the virile
types which passed before his eyes. Memlinc dreams as he looks,
chooses what is most lovable and delicate in human forms, and
creates above all as his feminine type a choice being who was
unknown before his time, and has disappeared since. They are
women, but women seen according to the tender predilections
of a spirit in love with grace, nobility, beauty." Memlinc's
men, on the other hand, do not compare advantageously with Van
Eyck's. There is more vigour in the latter, more framework,
more muscle, more blood. "Memlinc's art is very human, but
there is in it no trace of the villainies and atrocities of
his time. His ideal is his own. It foreshadowed perhaps the
Bellinis, the Botticellis, the Peruginos, but not Leonardo, nor
the Tuscans, nor the Romans of the Renaissance. Imagine in the
midst of the horror of the century a privileged spot, a sort of
angelic retreat where the passions are silenced and troubles
cease, where men pray and worship, where physical and moral
deformities are transfigured, where new sentiments come into
being and sweet usages grow up like the lilies: imagine this
and you will have an idea of the unique soul of Memlinc and of
the miracle which he works in his pictures" (Fromentin: _Les
Maitres d'Autrefois_).
In front is a portrait of the donor of the picture. On the Virgin's
left is St. George with the dragon--not a very dreadful dragon,
either--"they do not hurt or destroy" in the peaceful gardens that
Memlinc fancied. Notice how the peaceful idea is continued in the man
returning to his pleasant home in the background to the left. The
Virgin herself is typical of the feminine idea in early Flemish art.
"It must be borne in mind that the people of the fifteenth century
still lived in an age when the language of symbols was rich and widely
understood.... The high forehead of the Virgin and wide arching brows
tell of her intellectual power, her rich long hair figures forth
the fulness of her life, her slim figure and tiny mouth symbolise
her purity, her mild eyes with their drooping eyelids discover her
devoutness, her bent head speaks of humility. The supreme and evident
virtue which reigns in all these Madonnas is an absolute purity of
heart" (Conway's _Early Flemish Painters_, pp. 109, 110).