Master of the Baroncelli Portraits

In the 1480s Bruges was the banking crossroads of northern Europe, and among the Italians working there was Pierantonio Baroncelli, a Florentine merchant. He and his wife, Maria Bonciani, sat for their portraits, kneeling in prayer the way donors did, on what were once the wings of a small folding altarpiece. Those two panels found their way back to Florence, and today they hang in the Uffizi.

The painter who made them left no signature, so he carries the name of his sitters, the Master of the Baroncelli Portraits. He worked in the manner of Hans Memling, the leading painter of Bruges, with the same still, glassy light and patient detail, and only a handful of other pictures have been traced to his hand.

One of them, a crowded Pentecost whose history runs back to Bruges around 1600, resurfaced at auction in 2010 and sold for more than four million pounds.