Hans Memling

Hans Memling was born in Germany but made his career in Bruges, the richest trading city in northern Europe in the late 15th century, where Italian bankers and foreign merchants wanted their piety painted with Flemish precision. He became the town's leading painter and a wealthy man, taxed among its richest citizens.

His art is calm almost to the point of stillness. Where his predecessors could be tense or strange, Memling gave his Madonnas and donors smooth, untroubled faces in tidy, sunlit settings, which is much of why patrons loved him. One of his most inventive works is the Shrine of Saint Ursula, finished around 1489, a small gilded reliquary shaped like a Gothic church, its sides painted with the legend of Ursula and her companions killed by the Huns at Cologne, told in scenes that read almost like a strip of pictures.

That shrine, along with several other Memlings, still sits in the building it was made for, the old Saint John's Hospital in Bruges, where nuns and brothers nursed the sick. He also helped spread the fashion for portraits set against real landscapes rather than blank gold, an idea that travelled south and caught the eye of painters in Italy.