Betsabea al bagno

A full-length nude was an unusual thing for a Netherlandish painter to make around 1480. Bodies like this normally turned up only in a Last Judgement, packed in among the damned, never posed calmly for their own sake. Hans Memling paints Bathsheba stepping from an indoor bath, a maid holding out a cloth, a small white dog at her foot. High on a balcony behind her stands King David, who has just seen her and set in motion the affair the Book of Samuel goes on to tell. Memling gives the maid the gentle face and bearing of a Virgin Mary, borrowed straight from Rogier van der Weyden, so a biblical scandal is staged with the manners of a devotional picture. The panel is tall and narrow, roughly two metres high, and it is one of only a couple of secular nudes anyone attributes to him.