Porträt eines unbekannten Mannes vor Landschaft

We do not know who this man is. His clothes and careful haircut place him in Bruges around 1480 and mark him as wealthy, but no name survives. What made Memling's portraits new lies behind the sitter. Where earlier Flemish painters set a face against a plain dark ground, Memling opened a window onto real landscape, soft hills, a winding road, small trees fading into haze. Bruges was then one of Europe's great trading cities, and pictures like this travelled out with the merchants who commissioned them. Several Memlings reached Florence within his own lifetime, and Italian painters there studied those deep backgrounds closely, copying the receding roads and distant hills into portraits of their own.