Gerard David

By the time Gerard David settled in Bruges around 1484, the city's great age was already slipping. The harbour that had made it the trading capital of northern Europe was silting up, and merchants were drifting toward Antwerp. David inherited the workshop tradition of Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling, the earlier Bruges masters, and for a generation he kept the city's painting alive almost single-handedly.

In 1498 the town magistrates gave him a grim commission for their own council chamber, two large panels showing the Judgement of Cambyses. A corrupt judge named Sisamnes is arrested, then flayed alive, and his skin is stretched over the seat where the next judge will sit. David painted the flaying in cool, exact detail, the way you might record a fact. It hung where the aldermen deliberated, a reminder of what was expected of them.

Most of his work is quieter than that. His Madonnas and altarpieces have a still, devotional calm, with soft landscapes opening behind the figures, and he was among the first northern painters to give those backgrounds real weight. When David died in 1523 the centre of Netherlandish art had moved on to Antwerp, and his name faded so completely that scholars only recovered it in the 19th century, pieced back together from documents and the paintings themselves.