Memling's Portraits
The other night, Kathleen and I met at Shakespeare & Co's Hunter College branch. She was coming uptown, I down. We cut through the icy winds over to Fifth Avenue and the Frick Collection, for a rare Monday-night members' viewing of the current special exhibition, Memling's Portraits.
Hans Memling is one of the very greatest fifteenth-century Netherlandish painters, in company with Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Robert Campin. He died in 1494 at the age of fifty-four, at a moment when Dürer was in his apprenticeship. From the growth on evidence in the exhibition, I think there's no telling how far into the new sensibility Memling would have pushed, but the latest painting in the show reminded me of Holbein. Not that I'm complaining.
The thirty-odd pictures in the show are very choice, and they come from all over the world. The Frick Collection (which owns one of the pictures) is the only American venue for the show - aren't we lucky! To be perfectly vulgar, the show is a cross between the best Met retrospective and a private viewing of the thirty most expensive objects ever sold by Harry Winston. I know that there are still people who feel that what was going on in the Netherlands in the fifteenth century is hopeless primitive when contrasted with contemporary Italian work, and to them I will say that one of the Memlings on view was bought by the Uffizi in the 1830s as an Italian picture.
Sadly, the Frick has put nothing on line, so there's nothing to show or tell, and I haven't yet acquired the catalogue. The pictures hit me strongly in two ways: first, they were so old (and yet in such good shape), and second, everyone was very mortal, even the very well-shaven nabob in the leopard-fur collar who was mistaken for an Italian in the 1830s. Almost all of the faces were cheerful and engaging, but they were all amazingly mortal. Portraits are often designed to survive their sitters, to maintain the illusion that the painted face still corresponds to a living one. That is not true of Memling's portraits. Their mortality is the source of uncanny power.
Comments
I love Hans Holbein. He's like chocolate cake.
Posted by: farmboyz | December 15, 2005 09:26 PM
RJ is right, the portraits are SO alive and immediate that I expected each person to open the window of the surounding frame and step out next to me. As you would expect, each portrait is painted in meticulous detail-down to the shape and cleanliness of the sitter's fingernails-and yet it isn't at all fussy, nor is it like a photograph. The color of the skin, the shape of the hair, the liveliness of the eyes all serve to portray an individual, not idealized, person,"in media res". The other great thing about the exhibit at the Frick in particular is that I didn't feel constrained from getting extremely close to the paintings, which I sometimes do at the Met.The show won't be in NYC for long, so for those lucky enought to be here now, run, don't walk, over there.
Posted by: Kathleen | December 16, 2005 11:35 AM