Portrait of Folco Portinari

Hans Memling worked in Bruges, but this small portrait ended up in Florence, and that journey is the point. In the 1480s the Portinari were Florentine bankers running the Medici bank's branch in Bruges, deep in Flemish territory, and they sat for the leading portraitist there. Memling gives this Portinari man the sharp, sober realism of the north, every fold of skin and a distant landscape through the window, a manner Italian painters were only beginning to absorb. Pictures like this, carried home in merchants' luggage, showed Florence what oil paint could do with a human face. It hangs today in the Uffizi, close to the great Portinari altarpiece the same family shipped south from Bruges.