Christus mit singenden und musizierenden Engeln

These three long panels are the survivors of something much bigger. Spanish merchants living in Bruges commissioned Memling in the late 1480s to decorate the organ of a royal monastery at Najera, in northern Spain, the old burial church of the kings of Navarre. Memling filled the wings with a choir of 16 angels, some singing from a shared book, others playing the instruments of his day, a psaltery, a portable organ, a trumpet marine, all rendered so precisely that historians of music still study them to see how such instruments were held and played. Christ stands at the centre in a jewelled cope, one hand raised in blessing. The panels left Spain in the 19th century and were bought by the museum in Antwerp in 1895.