Part 3

Scarcely less attractive, and in some respects even more interesting, is the celebrated diptych associated with the name of Martin van Nieuwenhove. Here we have a departure from Memlinc’s usual practice, which was to present the Blessed Virgin and Child in an open portico, the artist picturing them in a room amply lighted by windows, the upper portions of which are adorned with pictures in stained glass, while the lower halves, mostly thrown open, reveal inimitable scenes of country life; moreover, a convex mirror at the back of Our Lady reflects the depicted scene of the interior. The donor belonged to a noble family long settled in Bruges, evidently a man of great promise, for after being elected a member of the Town Council in 1492, he was chosen burgomaster in 1497 at the early age of thirty-three. Unfortunately he passed away in the prime of life a short three years later. The painting dates from 1487, and the portrait is Memlinc’s masterpiece in that branch of art.

The panel in the Louvre ranks equally with this production, its chief feature being the marvellous grouping of the donors and their family. James Floreins, younger brother of John, the spiritual master of Saint John’s Hospital, belonged to one of the wealthiest of the Bruges guilds, the Corporation of Master Grocers, among whose members (John Du Celier and William Moreel to wit) Memlinc found such generous patrons of his art. He had married a lady of the Spanish Quintanaduena family, who bore him nineteen children: the eldest son, a priest, is represented in furred cassock and cambric surplice, and the second daughter in the habit of a Dominican nun. This picture is another but wholly different departure from the setting usually affected by the artist in his presentment of the Virgin and Child. The throne here is erected in the middle of the nave of a round-arched church, a rood-screen of five bays shutting off the choir. The north transept porch, is adorned with statues of the Prophets, the south portal with others of the Apostles. The difficulty of grouping so large a family in the circumscribed space about the throne is obviated with consummate skill, the father and two eldest sons on the one side, and the mother and two eldest daughters on the other, being placed well in the foreground, while the younger members of either sex are disposed in the aisles, the upstanding figures of Saint James the Great and Saint Dominic beside the throne filling the void on either side which this arrangement entailed. Even here, with the limited opportunities the architectural setting affords, Memlinc will not be denied his predilection for landscape ornamentation, two delightful glimpses of country life enchanting the eye as it wanders down the transepts and out on to their porches.

If in these pages attention has perhaps been somewhat too exclusively devoted to the portraits of men left us by Memlinc, obviously enough because of the greater interest they excite by the stories known of their careers, it must not be supposed that he proved himself less skilful as a portrayer of women. As a rule the wives of the donors in his pictures are of the homely type, but they appeal to us none the less as typical examples of the womankind of a burgher community in which the virtues of the home were cherished and sedulously cultivated. Two exceptionally fine specimens of male and female portraiture, which most likely belong to this period, are the bust of an old man in the Royal Museum at Berlin and that of an aged lady, recently acquired by the Louvre for the very substantial sum of 200,000 francs. If, as has been suggested, these are portraits of husband and wife, it is regrettable that they should have strayed so far apart, but the latter we have selected for illustration as perhaps the best available example to demonstrate Memlinc’s aptitude for the interpretation of the dignity of old age in woman.

More amazing perhaps than the magnitude of the work Memlinc achieved is the dearth of information concerning him that has been vouchsafed to us. Until 1860 nothing whatever was known of the story of his life, and what has been since discovered is almost entirely due to the painstaking researches of one or two individuals. These revealed the fact of Memlinc’s marriage, the name of the woman he chose for his wife and that of her father, the fact that she bore him three sons--John, Cornelius, and Nicolas--the year of his wife’s death, the record of house property bought by him, the date of his own death and his place of burial, and this is the sum total of the material at our disposal, apart from his paintings, with which to build up his biography. The Shrine that is his masterpiece once completed, the only other dated work of which we have any knowledge is the polyptych altarpiece which hangs in the Greverade chantry of the Cathedral at Lubeck. This bears on its frame the date 1491; but the execution of the painting is very unequal, and it appears probable that the greater part is the work of pupils. Perhaps Memlinc felt that he had lived his life, and was content to lay aside palette and brush in the consciousness that he had given the world of his best. May-be, too, as the years began to tell, there grew a yearning for the privacy of home life in more intimate communion with the motherless children from whom he himself was soon to be parted. All too speedily the end came, for he passed away on the 11th of August 1494, at a ripe old age considering the average length of days meted out to man in his time.

VII

EFFACEMENT AND VINDICATION OF HIS TYPES

Bruges, the scene of his stupendous lifework and his home for nearly the last thirty years of his life, was fast settling down to utter stagnation and the general poverty it superinduced. One needs to realise the measure of her decay to understand the possibility of such a personality as Memlinc’s fading from the public memory. True, he had founded no school to perpetuate his art and cherish his name and reputation. Twice we find mention of apprentices in the register of the Guild of Painters--a John Verhanneman, inscribed on 8th May 1480, and a Passchier Van der Meersch, in 1483. Neither attained the rank of master-painter. Nor is it known that any of the three sons inherited their father’s talent or followed his profession. However, we remember that Rumwold De Doppere, writing of his death in the year it occurred, asserted that he was “then considered to be the most skilful and excellent painter in the whole of Christendom,” while Van Vaernewyck, as late as 1562, tells of the houses of Bruges being still filled with paintings by Memlinc among other great artists. And yet so completely was he forgotten within a century of his death that Van Mander, when preparing his biographies of Netherlandish painters (published in 1604), could only learn that he was in his day “a celebrated master who flourished before the time of Peter Pourbus”--that is, before 1540! Neglect and disdain followed speedily on forgetfulness, and the scattering of his priceless works commenced. The magnificent picture of the Passion of Christ in the Turin Museum, which adorned the altar of the chapel of the Guild of Saint John and Saint Luke in the Church of Saint Bartholomew until 1619, was then removed to a side wall, and five years later sold to make room for an organ! The no less famous painting “Christ the Light of the World,” which graced the altar of the chapel of the Guild of Tanners in the Church of Our Lady until 1764, was then removed to the house of the dean, who a few years later sold it to a picture-dealer at Antwerp for 20 _l._! And so these masterpieces were made the sport and spoil of picture-dealers and traffickers in curiosities. Under Spanish rule further toll was levied on the art treasures of Bruges, and of what escaped the vulgar vandalism of the Calvinists, whose utter inability to create was only equalled by their senseless capacity for destruction, the French revolutionaries, whose sense of the beautiful in art not all their irreligion had sufficed to stifle, claimed a considerable share. Fortunately the ultimate defeat of Napoleon made restitution in a measure possible, and so the Moreel triptych, seized on 23rd August 1794, and the Van Nieuwenhove diptych, carried off in the same month, were recovered in 1815. Still the fact remains that Bruges at this date possesses only seven of Memlinc’s works. The remainder are dispersed among the galleries of the Continent--in Brussels and Antwerp; in Paris; in Madrid; in Rome, Florence, Turin, and Venice; in Vienna and Buda-Pesth; in Berlin, Frankfort, Munich, Danzig, Lubeck, Hermannstadt, and Woerlitz; and at the Hague; while England boasts of three pictures, two in the National Gallery and one at Chatsworth.

Although Memlinc founded no school, the masters of his day and others who settled in Bruges in the sixteenth century were to a very appreciable extent influenced by his art. Gerard David, Albert Cornelis, Peter Pourbus, and the Claeissens all felt its impress, and if the traditions of the old school survived in Bruges to a later period than in other centres, and well into the seventeenth century, it was mainly through the instrumentality of these painters. In contrasting the lives of mediæval and modern artists one cannot escape a feeling of regret that the former should so utterly have neglected the literary side of their calling. What a revelation to us would have been the discovery of the personal recollections of but one of these great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and what a world of trouble they would have saved the art students of after generations! But seemingly the demand for this class of literature had not then arisen, while the craving for notoriety which would have compelled an effort of this description was altogether foreign to the single-minded nature of a school whose art was to its exponents something more than the realisation of worldly ambition or the satisfaction of a vulgar lust of gain. There could have been no hankering after either in the type of man revealed to us by the lifework of Memlinc. And so it was that with the reawakened interest in mediæval painting which made itself manifest in the nineteenth century the services of the archæologist had to be requisitioned. Difficult indeed would it be to exaggerate the immensity of the task imposed upon him. The sifting from the mass of popular fiction which had gathered round Memlinc’s name the few grains of truth embedded in it, the ceaseless delving among municipal and ecclesiastical archives for a chance record of some incident in his career, the slow process of authenticating the genuine from the ruck of doubtful and spurious works associated with his name, half a century of unswerving devotion to the task has not yet brought us within measurable reach of its accomplishment. Every day, so to speak, brings to light some new fact, often compelling a revision of conclusions which in its absence were sufficiently justified.

Thus it happened that the identification of the donors of the “Last Judgment” at Danzig, in 1902, led to the recognition of this earliest example of Memlinc’s art. And so no doubt will it happen again, each fresh discovery amplifying the knowledge necessary to remove doubt as to the authenticity of attributed works. But even so, what an advance from half a century since, when the personality of the painter was but the sport of idle legend, and loomed vaguely on the horizon in the distorted outlines of a loathsome caricature! If dearth of information is a powerful incentive to the imagination, then the evolution of the Memlinc legend goes far to establish its potency. An obscure seventeenth-century tradition had it that Memlinc painted a picture for the Hospital of Saint John in grateful recognition of services rendered to him by the Brethren of that charitable foundation: from which indeterminate report grew a tale of a dissolute soldier of fortune spared from the shambles of the field of Nancy dragging his wounded and diseased body to the Hospital gates, and beguiling the weary hours of a long convalescence there in the production of a masterpiece of painting in token of his gratitude. As an unconnected story for the amusement of simple-minded folk the fable is not without merit of a sort, but what a libel on the Christian artist who transcends all the painters of his age in the interpretation of deep religious feeling, and the shaping of whose whole life must have been a novitiate to this end! We have travelled a long road since the days when this preposterous legend was exploded. True, the exhumation of Memlinc’s individuality from the burial-ground of lost memories has been a slow and arduous process; but the rich store of knowledge now at our command is an abundant testimony to the patience of the experts who have garnered it.

It is not given to us to be all swayed in the same way or to the same extent by Art in any of its forms; but few who have been led to contemplate the masterpieces of the Netherlandish school will fail to pay the tribute of admiration these wonderworks evoke, and bear testimony to their educational value. For Hans Memlinc it is not claimed that he surpassed in each department of his art all the other painters who helped to build up the fame of the Netherlandish school: in some material respects his methods differed widely from theirs, and he elaborated a technique distinctly his own. It is not likely to be imputed that his sedulous avoidance of the marked contrasts of light and shade was a confession of inability to realise their treatment, though possibly he may be thought by some to have weakly followed the line of least resistance. Of course, Memlinc, like every other great artist of his age, had his limitations. His knowledge of anatomy naturally was not equal to the exact requirements of science, the pose of his figures not absolutely conformable to the ideals of the dilettante in respect of grace of carriage or correctness of deportment. Though critics contrast the simplicity of his art with the grandeur of style of Van Eyck, commonly with some predilection for the latter, yet it is possible for one to be subjugated by it and still feel to the full the fascination of the tender beauty inherent in the former. In his conceptions of the great mysteries of the Christian faith, in the characterisation of the many saints he portrayed, and above all in his varied presentation of womanhood he certainly excelled. In the “Last Judgment” at Danzig we have probably the least successful of his great efforts. The conception is not original, though admittedly one of the finest produced up to that time; also it is his earliest extant work, and in the style of a master from whose controlling influence he had not yet emancipated himself. But the fault lies rather with the subject. Many an artist has laboured at it, not always perhaps from choice; but the painter has yet to be born who will produce a convincing picture of that unrealised tragedy. Any attempt that falls short of conveying to the mind and soul of man the awe-full warning it should express necessarily bears the stamp of failure; and when, as too often is the case, it but provokes a smile by reason of its incongruity, the effort it cost stands unjustified. Not that Memlinc’s conception errs conspicuously in this sense: but it lacks conviction, and not all the beautiful work it exhibits can close our eyes to the fact.

To the up-to-date art critic of the weekly press, steeped in modernity, all this grand religious art of the middle ages is but as the dead ashes of a fire that once glowed but has now lost its warmth; or, to vary the simile, he contemptuously relegates it to the scrap-heap of antiquated material as the useless remains of a “dead language”; little bethinking himself of the great underlying truth he was unconsciously voicing. For just as all succeeding literatures found their spring and inspiration in the magnificent literatures enshrined in the great dead languages of Rome and Greece, so likewise has modern art, unconsciously if you will, but none the less assuredly, derived the essence of its loveliness from the mediæval art it affects to despise. Art of any kind to be great must have realised its greatness through the vivifying power of the art that had gone before. _Ex nihilo nihil fit._ The impellent craving after realism of the materialistic school of to-day is but a perverted form of the love of truth which was the keynote of all mediæval art, its cult of the sensuous but a depraved phase of a love of the beauty in virtue and godliness which characterised the latter: the great touch of faith is wholly wanting. In art as in all things human there is no finality; but the while Bruges subsists, though she were utterly bereft of all her picturesqueness and the wealth of architectural beauty that endears her to the artist mind, so long will that treasure-house of Memlinc’s art, the small chapter-room in the Hospital of Saint John, continue to exercise its educating influence, and so long, because of it, will the old Flemish capital, though shorn of all its pristine glory, continue to be one of the most cherished shrines of the art pilgrims of the world.

The plates are printed by BEMROSE & SONS, LTD., Derby and London

The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh

End of Project Gutenberg's Memlinc, by W. H. James Weale and J. Cyril Weale