The Canon Gilles Joye

In 1472 Bruges was among the richest cities in northern Europe, and the chapel of its Burgundian dukes kept the finest singers on the continent. Gilles Joye was one of them: a composer of graceful love songs and, until the year before, a singer in Duke Charles the Bold's chapel, as well as a canon of the great church of Saint Donatian in the city. Memling, himself newly settled in Bruges, painted him at 47, and set the age and the year 1472 on the original frame, which the picture still keeps, one of the earliest Netherlandish portraits to carry its own date. The face he gives us is grave and devout, the very picture of a churchman. The cathedral's own records tell a rowdier story: Joye turns up in them for street brawls, for the town brothels, and for keeping a woman. His hands are joined as if he had just closed a book of hours.