686. THE VIRGIN AND CHILD.
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).