玉座の聖母子と二人の音楽天使

Memling worked in Bruges, the richest trading city of the north, where Italian bankers and merchants kept whole households. That connection is probably how a small Flemish devotional panel like this one made its way to Florence. It is the centre of a folding altarpiece painted around 1480, the Madonna seated with the Christ child while two angels play, a lute on one side and a harp on the other. Memling had trained in the Brussels workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, the leading Netherlandish master, and softened his teacher's sharp drama into this calm, even sweetness. The panel entered the Uffizi in 1779, from a local collection, long after it left the Bruges workshop that made it.