Cristo con angeli cantori e musicanti

These three long panels are the survivors of something much bigger. Spanish merchants living in Bruges commissioned Memling in the late 1480s to decorate the organ of a royal monastery at Najera, in northern Spain, the old burial church of the kings of Navarre. Memling filled the wings with a choir of 16 angels, some singing from a shared book, others playing the instruments of his day, a psaltery, a portable organ, a trumpet marine, all rendered so precisely that historians of music still study them to see how such instruments were held and played. Christ stands at the centre in a jewelled cope, one hand raised in blessing. The panels left Spain in the 19th century and were bought by the museum in Antwerp in 1895.