Stop and Look: Hans Memling
Memling very deliberately relates the biblical narrative to the reality of modern Flanders.
Hans Memling - or Memlinc - who was born in the Upper Rhine but passed much of his career in Bruges, exemplifies the achievement of north European painters in the High Renaissance: he renders a tender and dignified humanity in the language of searching realism.
The idealised generalisation of contemporary Italian painting is quite absent: here, everything is observed as if in the everyday world. These are all very real people, living out actual lives in a known country - a Flemish landscape that comes into view through each window opening in this complex architectural stage-set. The story of the birth of Christ is told in three separate scenes – a well-known narrative technique: the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, and the presentation of the Child in the Temple.
Memling very deliberately relates the biblical narrative to the reality of modern Flanders. The Three Kings, or Wise Men, are clearly individualised: Caspar and Melchior are actually portraits of two Dukes of Burgundy: Charles the Bold and Philip the Good. The African Prince Balthasar has his own splendid costume of black and gold; and Joseph is recognizably a portrait of the same man in all three scenes: he holds a candle at the Nativity and a jug of water at the Presentation of the Christ Child to the priest Simeon in the Temple, while he stands modestly aside in the presence of the adoring Kings in the central panel. The Child in all three episodes is an entirely believable infant, exposed and vulnerable amidst all this grandeur.
Like many works in The Prado, this wonderful picture belonged to a later Duke of Burgundy, who, as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, famously patronised Titian and other masters of his time.
He presided over the Habsburg empire, which incorporated so much of sixteenth-century Europe, and was also King of Spain and a principal source of the rich collections in the Prado. It’s startling to remember that Charles V’s successor in Spain, Philip II, married Henry VIII’s daughter, Mary Tudor (the wedding took place in Winchester Cathedral), so that, for a brief space, England was actually a part, if only by association, of that sprawling empire.
The convolutions of the Habsburg dynasty explain the presence in Madrid of Flemish masterpieces like the Memling, and it’s invigorating to realise that these intimate connections link what we too often think of as far-distance places, scattered across the continent and unrelated to our national history.
In a further twist of history, a hundred years later, another collection of masterpieces, that of England’s Charles I, would be broken up and contributed many of its finest works to The Prado.