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Cornugaya Directory 06
Page 10
Memling (1425?-1495?), one of the greatest of the school, is another
man about whose life little is known. He was probably associated with
Van der Weyden in some way. His art is founded on the Van Eyck school,
and is remarkable for sincerity, purity, and frankness of attitude. As
a religious painter, he was perhaps beyond all his contemporaries in
tenderness and pathos. In portraiture he was exceedingly strong in
characterization, and in his figures very graceful. His flesh painting
was excellent, but in textures or landscape work he was not
remarkable. His best followers were Van der Meire (1427?-1474?) and
Gheeraert David (1450?-1523). The latter was famous for the fine,
broad landscapes in the backgrounds of his pictures, said, however, by
critics to have been painted by Joachim Patinir. He was realistically
horrible in many subjects, and though a close recorder of detail he
was much broader than any of his predecessors.
Painting in Flanders starts abruptly with the
fifteenth century. What there was before that time more than
miniatures and illuminations is not known. Time and the Iconoclasts
have left no remains of consequence. Flemish art for us begins with
Hubert van Eyck (?-1426) and his younger brother Jan van Eyck
(?-1440). The elder brother is supposed to have been the better
painter, because the most celebrated work of the brothers--the St.
Bavon altar-piece, parts of which are in Ghent, Brussels, and
Berlin--bears the inscription that Hubert began it and Jan finished
it. Hubert was no doubt an excellent painter, but his pictures are few
and there is much discussion whether he or Jan painted them. For
historical purposes Flemish art was begun, and almost completed, by
Jan van Eyck. He had all the attributes of the early men, and was one
of the most perfect of Flemish painters. He painted real forms and
real life, gave them a setting in true perspective and light, and put
in background landscapes with a truthful if minute regard for the
facts. His figures in action had some awkwardness, they were small of
head, slim of body, and sometimes stumbled; but his modelling of
faces, his rendering of textures in cloth, metal, stone, and the like,
his delicate yet firm _facture_ were all rather remarkable for his
time. None of this early Flemish art has the grandeur of Italian
composition, but in realistic detail, in landscape, architecture,
figure, and dress, in pathos, sincerity, and sentiment it is
unsurpassed by any fifteenth-century art.
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