Portrait of Maria Portinari

Hans Memling · 1470

The story

Portrait of Maria Portinari is a small c. 1470 painting by Hans Memling in tempera and oil on oak panel. It portrays Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, about whom very little is known. She is about 14 years old, and depicted shortly before her wedding to the Italian banker, Tommaso Portinari. Maria is dressed in the height of late fifteenth-century fashion, with a long black hennin with a transparent veil and an elaborate jewel-studded necklace. Her headdress is similar and a necklace identical to those in her depiction in Hugo van der Goes's later Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475), a painting that may have been partly based on Memling's portrait.

The panel is the right wing of a devotional and hinged triptych; the lost center panel is recorded in sixteenth-century inventories as a Virgin and Child, and the left panel depicts Tommaso. The panels were commissioned by Tommaso, a member of a prominent Florentine family. Tommaso was a confidant of Charles the Bold and an ambitious manager of the Bruges branch of a bank controlled by Lorenzo de' Medici, and a well known and active patron of Flemish art. Tommaso eventually lost his position due to a series of large and risky unsecured loans given to Charles.

Maria and Tommaso's portraits hang alongside each other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The central panel is lost; some art historians suggest it may have been his Virgin and Child in the National Gallery, London.

Artist: Hans Memling
Date: 1470
Collection: The Met, New York, United States
Movement: Early Netherlandish painting
Medium: oil paint, panel
Size: 42 × 32 cm

Story adapted from the Wikipedia article and its contributors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Facts from Wikidata (CC0). Image: Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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