Diptych with two donors

A diptych like this was a private object, a small hinged pair of panels a wealthy couple could open for prayer at home. Memling painted these two around 1470 in Bruges, then one of the richest cities in northern Europe and his adopted home. On one wing a man kneels, on the other his wife, hands pressed together, and both would once have faced a third panel, a Virgin and Child that has since gone its separate way, leaving the couple praying toward nothing. Memling was the painter every Bruges merchant wanted, prized for exactly this kind of calm, sharply observed likeness. The two panels later passed through the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the great Habsburg picture-hoarder who governed the Netherlands for Spain.