‘The finest painter in the whole Christian world'. Hans Memling and his Art

Five hundred years ago the painter Hans Memling was buried in Bruges. The notary of the St Donaas Church noted in his diary that ‘the finest painter in the whole Christian world' had died that day. Of the painters known collectively as the ‘Flemish Primitives' (a name invented in the early nineteenth century to denote fifteenth-century painting in the Southern Netherlands), more work by Memling has come down to us than by anyone else. Almost one hundred paintings bear his name. On the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of his death in Autumn 1994, some thirty of these were being brought together in Memling's own city for the first time since 1939.