Memlinc

MEMLINC MASTERPIECES IN COLOR
MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR EDITED BY - - T. LEMAN HARE
HANS MEMLINC (?) 1425-1494
PLATE I.—OUR LADY AND CHILD. (frontispiece)
Right panel of a diptych, painted in 1487 for Martin van Nieuwenhove. It is now in Saint John’s Hospital, Bruges.
BY W. H. J. & J. C. WEALE
ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
IN SEMPITERNUM.
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.
MEMLINC
ALREADY, before the advent of the House of Burgundy, Bruges had attained the height of her prosperity. From a small military outpost of civilisation, built to stay the advance of the ravaging Northmen, she had developed through four short centuries of a strenuous existence into one of the three leading cities of northern Europe. Born to battle, fighting had been her abiding lot with but scant intervals of peace, and as it had been under the rule of her long line of Flemish counts, so it continued with increased vehemence during the century of French domination that followed, the incessant warring of suzerain and vassal being further complicated and embittered by internecine strife with the rival town of Ghent. But she emerged from the ordeal with her vitality unsapped, her industrial capabilities unabated, her commercial supremacy unshaken. Her population had reached the high total of a hundred and fifty thousand; she overlorded an outport with a further thirty thousand inhabitants, a seaport, and a number of subordinate townships. The staple of wool was established at her centre, and she was the chief emporium of the cities of the Hanseatic League. Vessels from all quarters of the globe crowded her harbours, her basins, and canals, as many as one hundred and fifty being entered inwards in the twenty-four hours. Factories of merchants from seventeen kingdoms were settled there as agents, and twenty foreign consuls had palatial residences within her walls. Her industrial life was a marvel of organisation, where fifty-four incorporated associations or guilds with a membership of many thousands found constant employment.