Le Jugement dernier

Memling painted this great triptych in Bruges in the late 1460s for a Florentine banker, Angelo Tani, who ran the local branch of the Medici bank and meant it for a family chapel near Florence. It never got there. In 1473 the ship carrying it south was seized by privateers out of Danzig, on the Baltic, commanded by a captain named Paul Beneke. The captured painting was handed to merchants of that port and given to a church there, and it has stayed in the city, now Gdansk, ever since. Open, it shows Judgment Day. Christ presides at the top, and below him the Archangel Michael weighs souls with a scale, the saved climbing crystal stairs on one wing while the damned tumble into darkness on the other.