Man with a Roman coin

The man in this portrait holds up a Roman coin, a bronze sestertius stamped with the head of the emperor Nero. It is a clue to who he was: most likely Bernardo Bembo, a Venetian scholar and diplomat who collected antique coins and served as his city's ambassador to the Burgundian court around 1471 to 1474. Memling painted him during those years in Bruges, then a meeting point where Italian humanists encountered Flemish craft. Behind the sitter opens a quiet landscape of water, trees and swans, one of the first times a portraitist set a face against real scenery instead of a flat dark ground. That small change, carried south by pictures like this, would soon reappear in the backgrounds of Botticelli and Perugino.