Trittico Pagagnotti

Around 1480, a Florentine churchman named Benedetto Pagagnotti, a bishop whose family moved in Medici circles, wanted a private altarpiece, and he did not order it from a Florentine. He sent to Bruges, to Hans Memling, whose oil technique Italian collectors prized above their own. What you see is the middle of that small triptych, the Virgin enthroned with the Child and two music-making angels. The two wings, showing Saint John the Baptist and Saint Lawrence, were later separated and hang today in London. On the back of those wings Memling painted something unusual for a devotional work, nine cranes standing in the dark beneath a coat of arms.