If Bruges had not existed it might have been invented by the Neo-Gothics of the nineteenth century. Its significant paintings are genuinely Pre-Raphaelite, its urban prospects picturesque, and its appeal to the literary mind certain. Nearly all of its architecture exemplifies Ruskin’s sixth principle, the Lamp of Memory.
More precisely, Bruges is the best town in Belgium, perhaps in western Europe, for anyone who wants to forget the industrialized world. A network of quiet canals mirrors masses of foliage, flowers, and Flemish brickwork. Gulls come in from the North Sea, nine miles away; there are venerable spires, twilit naves, fortified gates, street after street of quaintly gabled facades and some fifty bridges, many of them with Gothic humps.
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The cityscape is preternaturally close to what it was at the end of the Middle Ages. A visitor to the Groeninge Museum, where part of the local collection of Flemish masterpieces is kept, can find in paintings of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the same perspectives and landmarks just admired from the canal quays outside. Bruges, however, is not only the pocket Venice of the North and a fascinating entry for an account of romantic nostalgia in architecture. It is also the Pompeii of the North, minus the rain of hot ashes.
–Artist
Hans Memling (circa 1433–1494)
Title
Deutsch: Porträt einer Dame
Date 1480
Medium oil on panel—WIKI
It is the urban equivalent of one of those sad Siberian mammoths, frozen in the posture of the moment when things went fatally wrong. And the record- in chronicles, art, and economic data- of the life and death of the brilliant medieval town can be read more as a classical tragedy, complete with classical hubris, than as romantic idyll. One has only to accept the non-Aristotelian notion that businessmen can be both heroic and tragically flawed.
—One of the many anonymous Flemish artists in the generation of Hans Memling has been identified as the Master of the Legend of Saint Lucy after a painting located in the church of St James in Bruges.
In the foreground of the present painting the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child are seated with four female martyr-saints (Catherine, Barbara, Ursula, and Cecilia) in attendance. The courtly entourage is placed within an enclosed garden lined with roses, suggesting metaphorical associations with the paradise bower of the Song of Songs and the cult of the rosary. The carefully delineated city in the background can be identified as Bruges.—click image for source…
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