In the manner of Hans
Memlinc's Retable of the Passion of Christ (Turin Pinacoteca), Cranach pictures the successive events as if they were simultaneous.
Van Eyck's star was thrown into the shade by Rossetti's discovery of an artist of a generation later, Hans Memling or
Memlinc (1435-94), who worked in Bruges for most of his life.
Le formule delle dediche votive nella Grecia arcaica (
MemLinc ser.
Gerard David, that lyrical businessman of painting who seemingly could summon up inspiration at will,
Memlinc's imitator and rival who could render scenes of convincing tenderness and gross cruelty with impartial aplomb, painted miniatures in an overflow of his vast competence and energy: demure, winning angels and eagerly kind saints in the Breviary and the Book of Hours of Isabella of Castile (British Library, London, and Cleveland Museum).
There are many paintings of the Passion, ranging from
Memlinc's continuous representation of it in a single retable in the Turin Pinacoteca to Rembrandt's incomparable series in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.
Only two indisputably independent pictures survive by Albert Cornelisz, who settled in Bruges before 1513 and collaborated with Adriaen Ysenbrandt, the last follower of
Memlinc: The Coronation of the Virgin, awash with a flood-tide of angels, in the Jacobskerk in Bruges, and the less successful Glorification of the Virgin at Brighton, in which the homely Madonna is again surrounded by angels who fade, as in the Bruges picture, dim-faced into the sky.
Ysenbrandt was almost the last member of the School established by
Memlinc, and inherited
Memlinc's gentleness.
The two pictures ambitiously attributed to Hans
Memlinc, The Annunciation and The Rest on the Flight to Egypt, are not characteristic of that artist.
The ghost of Hans Memlinc, who died there five hundred years ago this month, would have no difficulty in finding its way around the entranced and entrancing Belgian city.
Just a year after his acceptance by the guild, Memlinc painted the Triptych of Sir John Donne, now in the National Gallery in London, a work consummate in imagination and technique, outdoing any other produced in Bruges since the time of Jan van Eyck.
Varari's distant testimony only adds to what is already evident: that Memlinc spent some time in the Studio of Rogier van der Weyden in Brussels, but not as an apprentice; more likely as first a journeyman, later a collaborator and finally a partner.
At least two of the Damned are tonsured monks, although Memlinc is more respectful to the clergy than Stephan Lochner, who consigns to his Underworld a bishop, a cardinal and a pope.