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Portraiture

Tommaso Portinari (ca. 1432–1501)
probably 1470
Hans Memling (act. by 1465, d. 1494)
Oil on wood
Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913; 14.40.626–627

The Portinari were members of Bruges’s large Italian mercantile community. Tommaso managed the Bruges branch of the Medici bank from 1465 to 1478, and his involvement in risky loans to Charles the Bold proved to be the bank’s undoing.

Among the masterpieces of northern Renaissance art, these portraits were probably commissioned on the occasion of the sitters’ marriage in 1470, when Maria was about fourteen and Tommaso about thirty-eight. The panels were the wings of a devotional triptych; the central element probably showed the Virgin and Child.

Here Memling followed the general formula of his mentor, Rogier van der Weyden, placing evenly lit heads against a flat, dark background. Enhancing the vivid impression of these paintings, the figures are placed simultaneously behind their actual frames (which are not original) and in front of the painted borders of their trompe-l’oeil stone moldings.

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