Here is one of the most significant portrait works of Memling. This is a busty depiction of a middle-aged, stern man. The artist gives it as close as possible, the mass of cool curly dark hair almost touches the edges of the picture; it seems that the head of the portrait is closely moved to an imaginary plane separating the world of the picture from the world of the viewer.
At close range, the artist attentively examines the large features of the broad face, noting the characteristic shape of the lips, the usual folds around the mouth and on the bridge of the nose, the hard, fixed gaze. Like many of the best Dutch portraits of the era, the picture conveys physical existence with striking convincingness: the person depicted “exists”, he is “present” here, and his image could least be called the “shadow of life”, as art was often called in olden times. The folded fingers indicate that once the picture served as a diptych sash: the second sash was occupied by some kind of religious scene, and the person in the portrait seemed to pray to her.
In the era of Memling such diptychs were widespread. On the back of the board on which the portrait is painted, the emblem of the customer is depicted, but still remain without the result of an attempt to determine the name of the person to whom it belonged. Over the shoulder of the unknown in the picture of Memling you can see a delicate distant landscape. Nature, her expedient beauty, her special life – all this since the beginning of the 15th century, from the Van Eyck era, attracted the attention of Dutch painters, but remained in their works not as the main, but as a secondary motif – a background for a biblical scene or portrait.
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