Ritratto di uomo sconosciuto con lettera

Around 1480 Bruges was one of the busiest ports in northern Europe, and its foreign colony of Italian bankers and traders kept Hans Memling supplied with sitters. We no longer know this man's name, but the letter in his hand and his fashionable black cap mark him out as a member of that southern merchant community, perhaps of the Florentine Portinari circle. Memling was doing something new with the setting. Instead of a flat dark ground he places the sitter before an open landscape, as if seen at a window, and Italian painters would borrow the idea from him. Portraits like this travelled south in the luggage of those same traders, which is how a Flemish head of an unknown man came to hang among the Italian panels of the Uffizi.