Saint Lawrence

Lawrence was a deacon of the church in Rome, put to death in the year 258, and tradition says he was roasted on a gridiron. Memling dresses him for his office, a white alb under a red dalmatic with fringed edges and bands of gold. He holds a book in one hand, and the iron grill hangs quietly at his side. The panel was the right wing of a small altarpiece made around 1480 for a Florentine bishop, Benedetto Pagagnotti. Its arch, its tiled floor and the green hills beyond were planned to carry on across all three panels, into the Virgin and Child now in the Uffizi. Once the altarpiece reached Florence, local painters studied it, and landscapes taken from it appear in work by Filippino Lippi from 1482 and 1483. The National Gallery bought this wing and its partner in 1865.