Portrait of Maria Portinari
Maria is dressed in the height of late fifteenth-century fashion, with a long black hennin with a transparent veil and an elaborate jewel-studded necklace.
Her headdress is similar and a necklace identical to those in her depiction in Hugo van der Goes's later Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475), a painting that may have been partly based on Memling's portrait.
Tommaso was a confidant of Charles the Bold and an ambitious manager of the Bruges branch of a bank controlled by Lorenzo de' Medici,[1] and a well known and active patron of Flemish art.
[6][7] Their small size and intimacy suggest that the portraits were commissioned for private prayer; some art historians believe, given Tommaso's cultural acumen and preoccupation with his social standing, that they were partially accessible to the public.
[9] Tommaso represented the Medici bank in Bruges, but after a promising early career he gave a number of risky and unsecured loans to Charles the Bold which were left unpaid and eventually led to the branch's insolvency.
The 1501 inventory places both portraits as wings, with a central Virgin and Child panel; "a small, valuable panel painting, with an image of Our Lady in the middle and on the sides painted Tommaso and mona Maria his wife" (una tavoletta dipinta preg[i]ata cum nel mezo una immagine di Nostra Donna e delle bande si è Tommaso e mona Maria sua donna dipinti in deta tavoletta).
[14] Her elbows rest on an unseen parapet that coincides with the lower edge of the painted stone frame, acting as a trompe-l'œil which situates her both in the same reality and in closer proximity to the viewer.
The upper line contains a row of onyx beads, from which hang, according to the art historian Sophie McConnell "small teardrops" gold and bluish-grey enameled wire.
[22] Dirk de Vos believes van der Goes may have seen Memling's panel when he stayed with Tommaso in Bruges c. 1497, and incorporated elements for his own depiction.
[23] Maryan Ainsworth concludes that they were removed from the final composition as they may have been "deemed too conspicuous a show of opulence in the presence of the Virgin and Child, most likely the now lost object of Maria's veneration.
"[24] Maria's ear was at one stage exposed, but was later covered by the wide frontlet of the hennin, a change of mind also found in the very similar portrait of the female donor in Memling's c. 1470s to early 1480 Donne Triptych.
[10] They were purchased, also in 1910, by the collector Benjamin Altman of New York on the advice of Max Friedländer, along with works by Albrecht Dürer, Gerard David and Hans Holbein the Younger – paintings whose "grave austerity seems to have been most in tune with his own taste".
