Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Hans Memling
Netherlandish; 15th-century
Bruges, Belgium: Museum St. John’s Hospital
92%
Triptych with John the Baptist and John the Evangelist. 1479. Oil on three panels
The busyness that characterizes this triptych is an intensification of earlier Flemish tendencies, à la Christus or van der Weyden. There is still, inside each of Memling's scattered figures, all of van Eyck's stillness and surety of comportment. But they also possess a newfound forcefulness — a heightened capacity for movement and interrelation — and it's doing things to their world, things that Campin's exquisitely cramped interiors could never have accepted. This is most evident in the oneirism of the right panel, but it's also there in the rückenfigur at left and the way his hip-thrust kicks off a zig-zag through the city street and past its walls and back into the far recesses of the image; or in the harsh distinction which the center panel's columns impose between the front and the back of the scene. (There's almost violence to the way the background's been cut into six thin slivers.) As the 15th century progressed, Netherlandish painting's tight tether to reality was transforming itself into something more like a shackle: Memling had to realize that his predecessors' verism was not a sustainable achievement, but rather a pit of polar forces that would come to rend apart pictorial perfection. Bosch dealt with this problem by thematizing it; Memling, here, tried instead to metabolize the coming rupture, to make it into a new, even a realer form of realness. A failed pursuit, but its result was this masterpiece. (TFS, 2026)
Bruges, Belgium: Museum St. John’s Hospital
88%
Triptych with the Adoration of the Magi. 1479. Oil on three panels
Each panel throws its figures into a different sort of architectural surround, and in answer the figure groups collect themselves differently, inhabit space in different ways: this responsiveness not simply of figures to their grounds, but of the precise comportment of each object to every other, across all strata of the illusion, is the root of Memling's quality. At right the figures' clustering in middle depth causes the system of apertures and enclosures in the cathedral walls behind them to bristle; at left the disjunct openness of the group contributes to the strange power and directness of the scene's hierarchical proportioning, but it also makes the Holy Family seem almost coddled by their humble stall. (Vide, too, the slight repoussoir of a crop of stones at lower left.) And at center, it's as if these two spatial programs from the wing panels are blended into one. Mary's upright centrality puts the dozen-ish figures around her into lockstep with their setting — see how Joseph's body doubles the angle of the wall at his back — but then their dispersion and individual liveliness seem to break apart the building almost as much as Mary (and the pyramid she forms with the magi) brings it together. The space of this picture engages in a push-pull between fragmentation and coalescence. This dynamic is the classic perfection of early Netherlandish illusion wrestling (this was decades after van Eyck) with its limits and its conditions of possibility. (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
80%
Christ with Singing and Music Making Angels. 1483-94. Oil on 3 panels
These three enormous panels originally comprised just a portion of a lost larger altarpiece, which you have to imagine was once one of the jewels of the last great phase of primitive Netherlandish art. As it stands now, this triptych-by-default is exquisite but (with justification, of course) unresolved. The whole thing repeatedly gestures downwards, not just literally, as in the case of Christ's downcast glance, but in general with every mote of its movement and weight: in each of the side panels the figures are positioned with a lateral rhythm that, by way of the inmost angels' jutting woodwinds, presses off of each image through its bottom inner corner; and then there's the gold space of heaven, which is open and airy at each pictures' top while the bodied mass of seraphs pulls the composition somewhat awkwardly earthward against it. These elements, and others, would have found completion in the rest of the polyptych, but here they're calls with no responses. Of course everything is still rendered with a supple stillness, and of course there's a thickness to the formal relations between these figures that, somehow, manages not to interrupt each one's enclosed and silent perfection. But these successes only make this artwork's incompleteness all the more lamentable. (TFS, 2026)
Bruges, Belgium: Groeningemuseum
78%
Moreel Triptych. 1484. Oil on three panels
The wing panels stake their claim to being European painting's first group portraits, which is of art historical significance. They're thick with detail (especially the right one) and they have the handsome appearance of polished stones. But as group portraits they don't quite rival, say, Dirck Jacobsz's famous Guardsmen from a few decades later, with its never-ending pinball game of pantomime. Elsewhere, Memling makes much out of his stiffness and his quietude. At his best, these qualities in his paintings can mount towards nearly unrivaled refinement; here, they're repetitive and in ungainly contrast with the dazzlingly various features painted into the background. (Patinir was soon to invent landscape as a separate genre to solve the problems that caused Memling to stumble in this work.) Across its three panels this altarpiece lacks the deliberate sense of placement, and of forms' responsiveness to each other across multiple layers of depth, that characterizes Memling's best work: Christ and his bearer are too neatly framed by the cliffs and the clouds; the throngs of supplicants leave little room for formal relations to fester. Of course, the fabrics and foliage and many disparate surfaces are extremely well-painted, but it amounts to much less than what's usual for Memling. (TFS, 2026)
Bruges, Belgium: Museum St. John’s Hospital
75%
Triptych with Lamentation of Christ. 1480. Oil on three panels
Despite their intricate interrelations, each body in this painting has a strong self-enclosed, almost atomic quality. This gives the picture a slightly staccato effect (especially in the middle panel) and dramatically emphasizes the distinction between figures and their grounds: look at the impossible distance between that limned left arm of Christ and the Virgin's cloak behind it. This hardness and linearity is common to early Netherlandish art, but in paintings from the end of the 15th century like this one, it begins to approach a degree of self-consciousness and high achievement that nearly amounts to a crisis. The figure group at center is almost exotically disunited, malformed by Christ's rigor mortis cleaving John from Mary and Mary from the front of the image. The fracturing stems from the same realist impulse that led Campin and van Eyck to sculpt their perfect spaces behind the picture plane, but their equanimity has been displaced by a nervous energy — it's utmost realism working its way past the point of tenability, almost like Italian Mannerism's emergence out of Renaissance balance and measure. Memling tends to wield this mounting contradiction better when he leans into it, but here there's a bid for balance that's totally confused by (among other things) the gulf between foreground figures and the background expanse. Against his reputation, Memling is not actually the great painter of old Flemish poise and precision, but of their steady dissolution. (TFS, 2026)