Triptych of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist (
St John Altarpiece)
Signed and dated 1479
St John’s Hospital Museum
The Triptych of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist (also known as the St John Altarpiece) is a key work in Memling’s oeuvre (fig. 1). It is the largest of the four commissions he received from the friars and nuns of St John’s Hospital, four of whom are depicted, kneeling, on the exterior of the altarpiece, captured in worship forever (fig. 2). The piece is also one of the largest that Memling ever made: when opened, it measures more than 3.5 metres wide and approximately 1.9 metres high. The altarpiece is dedicated to John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, the patron saints of St John’s Hospital and the figures who determine the entirety of the open triptych down to the smallest details. The two saints are seen together in the central panel, with episodes from their respective lives depicted behind them in smaller background images. These narrative lines extend into the background of the side panels, where the two saints appear again, now as the main character: John the Baptist on the left panel, John the Evangelist on the right one. Memling used almost every element in the composition to add extra meaning. He also incorporated a specific scene into the visual programme that alludes to the day-to-day life of the hospital community. Given that the monumental work offers so much to see, it is worth describing this iconographic programme in some detail.
Fig. 1 Hans Memling, Triptych of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist (St John Altarpiece) (open), dated 1479, oil on panel, 193.2 × 97.1 cm (left panel incl. original frame), 193.5 × 194.7 cm (central panel incl. original frame), 193.3 × 97.3 cm (right panel incl. original frame), Musea Brugge, Bruges, inv. O.SJ0175.I
Triptych of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist (St John Altarpiece)
St John’s Hospital: From the twelfth to the twenty-first century
St John’s Hospital (fig. 2 and 3) had already existed for several hundred years by the time Hans Memling settled in Bruges in 1465. Founded around the middle of the twelfth century, it was one of the earliest institutions in the city to care for local people and to receive travellers, such as pilgrims. The hospital’s original patron saint was John the Evangelist; it was only in the fifteenth century that John the Baptist was added, probably because of the saint’s immense popularity at the time.
Reflecting the meaning of hospitalis (hospitable) and hospes (guest), St John’s offered care to the poor, the sick and those in need. What this meant in practice was that the hospital took in ill travellers and pilgrims, but also homeless people. The ‘guests’ were drawn from Bruges and the surrounding area, as well as elsewhere in Flanders, Brabant, Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland, and even further afield, including northern France, Burgundy, Germany and Scotland. All were allowed to stay at the hospital – preferably for just one night – where they could count on a bed, food, warmth and rest. People with contagious diseases such as leprosy were not admitted, but they could go to the leper house (dedicated to Mary Magdalene) outside the city walls. Plague was rightly feared too.
Charitable institutions such as St John’s sprang up all over Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in response to urbanisation and the problems this brought, including the spread of disease. Hospitals met the welfare needs of individuals struck by adversity.
Mendicant orders such as the Dominicans and Franciscans made a particular contribution to the development of hospitals, although a great many were also founded by individual benefactors, mainly aristocrats. St John’s Hospital is unusual in that it was not originally linked to a monastery or church, but was set up by the civic authorities; from the outset, it was an institution provided by and for the people of Bruges.
When the hospital was founded, it was located just within the first city walls, as shown on the famous plan of Bruges drawn up by Marcus Gerards in 1562 (fig. 1). A convenient spot on the outskirts of the town and close to the water, it was connected by Mariastraat to
Fig. 2 St John’s Hospital, Bruges, front view
Fig. 1 Marcus Gerards, map of Bruges (detail), 1881, lithograph on paper (after the original copper engraving of 1562), 190 × 110 cm, Bruges City Archives, Bruges
Fig. 1 Hans Memling, Portrait of Willem Moreel, Mayor of Bruges from 1478 to 1483 (left panel of a triptych), c. 1482, oil on panel, 39 × 29 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, inv. 1451
Fig. 2 Hans Memling, Portrait of Barbara van Vlaenderberch, wife of Willem Moreel (right wing of a triptych), c. 1482, oil on panel, 39 × 29.7 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, inv. 1452
Memling ’s patrons
Several historians have researched Memling’s clientele, with the result that we know more about them than those of any other fifteenth-century Netherlandish painter. Most of Memling’s works were painted to order – over two-thirds, at least, and perhaps more given that nothing is known about the purchasers of the other works. Paintings that might have been produced for the open market include standalone panels featuring the Virgin and Child. Commissioned works were more expensive than ones done speculatively – the difference between bespoke and off-the-peg, as it were – and only accounted for a small proportion of overall sales. The conclusion is that Memling focused on the higher, if not the very highest, section of the market, which speaks in turn to the immense success he enjoyed.
More than a quarter of the clients who commissioned a work from Memling have been identified. For the most part they were leading local citizens, closely followed by prominent Italians. Memling’s popularity among Italians is borne out by the fact that several of his works were already in Italy by the end of the fifteenth century.
His local patrons were mainly senior clergy, merchants and bankers, who ordered works for chapels in churches and no doubt also for private places of worship in their own homes. The friars and nuns of St John’s
Hospital are an example of the first category. Another important patron might have been involved in the hospital community’s commission: Ferry de Clugny, Bishop of Tournai from 1474, who probably ordered an Annunciation from Memling for himself in around 1465–70 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Memling probably began to work for Jan Crabbe, abbot of Ten Duinen, shortly after arriving in Bruges. Crabbe commissioned the triptych of which the Annunciation formed part (see ‘Annunciation’). Commissions from merchants could also lead to further orders from their relatives. A painting by Memling, Madonna and Child with Saint James and Saint Dominic (now in the Louvre, Paris), depicts Jacob Floreins with his Spanish wife and their seven sons and twelve daughters. Jacob – younger brother of the hospital friar Jan Floreins – was active in the grocers’ guild. Willem Moreel, an important Bruges politician, was involved in the same trade. In addition to the large altarpiece in which he is represented along with his whole family (see ‘Moreel Triptych’), Moreel and his wife commissioned another smaller triptych from Memling, of which only the panels containing their portraits, have survived (fig. 1 and 2). Given Memling’s fame and his long association with Bruges, it is notable that the city itself does not appear to have ordered work from him.
‘ The most accomplished and excellent painter of the whole Christian world’
That Memling could apparently afford to specialise in panel paintings was unusual in late medieval artistic practice. Painters who worked in oils usually engaged in other activities too, such as embellishing wooden sculptures or painting on canvas in watercolour, in which the pigments are bound with gum or glue rather than oil. In 1435, for instance, the civic authorities in Bruges paid Jan van Eyck to polychrome and gild a number of statues for the facade of the town hall.
Memling’s regular imitation of other materials in his work indicates that he was well aware of his own skills. For example, he painted the wooden frames or the backs of his panels to suggest that they were made of stone or marble. He also made frequent allusions to sculpture, such as the figures in niches executed in grisaille on the exterior of triptychs, or to metalwork, as on the St Ursula Shrine. Memling built successfully on the enormous advances achieved by brilliant artists of the previous generation, most notably Van Eyck and Van der Weyden (see ‘Painting in the Burgundian Netherlands’). Their extraordinary ability to observe the properties of light, coupled with their technical skill in the handling of oils, allowed them to imitate the most precious materials in paint. They could emu-
late gold so perfectly, for instance, that they no longer had to use gold leaf, as panel painters had done in the past. All this fuelled the myth that Van Eyck actually invented the technique of oil painting. While untrue, the story shows that his innovations and supreme skills were acknowledged by contemporaries in the Burgundian Netherlands and beyond – especially in Italy, where some of his work was to be found. Although painters chiefly used simple means (wood, binding medium and pigments), they also appreciated the special properties of rare and precious materials. A good example is ultramarine, a pigment that came primarily from Afghanistan, yielded the brightest blue and was reserved for particular uses, such as the final layer of paint on the Virgin Mary’s cloak.
Memling shared a penchant for inscriptions with Van Eyck and the Master of Flémalle/Robert Campin, and also an interest in reflections. This arose partly from his characteristic attention to different materials. Reflections are found throughout his work, from the mirror in the Diptych of Maarten van Nieuwenhove to the water in his treatment of the Apocalypse in Triptych with the Last Judgement (see fig. 3 in ‘Memling’s patrons’). Unlike Van Eyck, Memling’s reflections
Portrait of a Young Woman or Sibylla Sambetha
Dated 1480
St John’s Hospital Museum
A young woman is depicted half-length against a dark background, her body turned slightly so that we see a little over three-quarters of her face (fig. 2). Her greygreen eyes stare straight ahead. The portrait is generally known today as the Sibylla Sambetha, based on the text in the cartouche in the upper left, even though it has long been recognised that this inscription, like the banderole at the bottom, were later additions. We do not, therefore, know the woman’s real name.
Fashionable
The portrait seems quite simple at first. Apart from a few colour accents – the wide, snow-white fur collar (and similar cuffs) and her red bodice – she appears to be dressed entirely in black, with a small piece of decorative green ribbon visible around her waist. But pigments alter over time and so the green of the ribbon and the deep blue of the clothes (they were not originally black, and might even have been of a more purplish hue) have converged, making the colours harder to distinguish. Like the rest of her outfit, the woman’s sweptback hair, giving her a high forehead, and her equally dark, cone-shaped headgear (hennin) are in keeping with the fashion of the time. The hennin, for instance, is very similar to the one worn by Katelijne van Rijbeke, wife of the wealthy Bruges merchant Pieter Bultynck, whom Memling also painted in 1480. She appears in the bottom right of the large and ambitious Seven Joys of the Virgin (fig. 1). Both women undoubtedly belonged to the same social class. The rectilinear forms of the gossamer-fine veil that Memling painted over part of the young woman’s face and left eye (fig. 3) create an almost abstract contrast with the dark background, while emphasising her porcelain-like skin. The cross pendant, set with three pearls, must have been a popular style at the time, as was the wearing of multiple rings on a single finger. Similar items are found in other Memling portraits of both men and women. The style and finish of the clothes and the type of jewellery the woman wears leave no room for doubt that her origins were far from humble. Anything less would be surprising, in fact, since only wealthy citizens could afford to have their portraits painted by Hans Memling at the height of his fame.
Fig. 2 Hans Memling, Portrait of a Young Woman or Sibylla Sambetha , dated 1480, oil on panel, 46.6 × 35.2 cm (incl. original frame), Musea Brugge, Bruges, inv. O.SJ0174.I
Fig. 1 Hans Memling, Seven Joys of the Virgin (detail), dated 1480, oil on panel, 81.3 × 189.2 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inv. WAF 668
Colophon
Texts
Anna Koopstra
Image research
Marijn Everaarts
Anna Koopstra
Translation
Ted Alkins
Copy-editing
Cath Phillips
Project management
Stephanie Van den bosch
Design
Tim Bisschop
Printing die Keure, Bruges, Belgium
Binding
Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium
Publisher Gautier Platteau
ISBN 978 94 6466 689 2 D/2023/11922/68 NUR 642
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Cover images
Details from: Hans Memling, Triptych of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist (St John Altarpiece) (open), dated 1479, oil on panel, 193.2 × 97.1 cm (left panel incl. original frame), 193.5 × 194.7 cm (central panel incl. original frame), 193.3 × 97.3 cm (right panel incl. original frame), Musea Brugge, Bruges, inv. O.SJ0175.I