Van Eyck saw with his eyes, Memling begins to see with his soul. The one
had a good and a right vein of thought; the other does not seem to
think so much, but he has a heart which beats in a quite different way.
The one copied and imitated, the other copies too and imitates, but
transfigures. The former reproduced--without any preoccupation with the
ideal types of humanity--above all, the masculine types, which passed
before his eyes in every rank of the society of his time; the latter
contemplates nature in a reverie, translates her with imagination,
dwells upon everything which is most delicate and lovely in human forms,
and creates, above all, in his type of woman a being exquisite and
elect, unknown before and lost with him.
_Fromentin_