Anna Koopstra

The Flemish Primitive artist Hans Memling (c. 1435–1494), who played a crucial role in early Netherlandish painting, is inextricably associated with Bruges. Among his most impressive creations are the St John Altarpiece and the St Ursula Shrine, which he created for St John’s Hospital in the city. Seven more of this 15th-century master’s finest works can also be seen in Bruges, at what is now the St John’s Hospital Museum and at the Groeninge Museum. This book describes Memling’s breathtaking paintings in close detail, while offering readers the opportunity to (re)discover his oeuvre as a whole. Text in English and Dutch.

Jean Bellegambe (c. 1470- 1535/36), whose career as far as we know spanned the first three decades of the sixteenth century, was a successful painter. His patrons included some of the most high-ranking clerics in the Habsburg-Burgundian Netherlands as well as members of the ruling class of Douai, the town where he lived and worked all his life. This is the first study to appear since Dehaisnes' 1890 monograph that is exclusively devoted to the artist. By reassessing primary evidence - archival documents and material evidence from the works of art themselves - it aims to highlight Bellegambe's artistic achievements. Close scrutiny of his paintings and investigation of the artist's working methods will show that Bellegambe visualised the concerns of his patrons by closely linking the physical characteristics of his works to their original imagery, function and use. This volume presents a series of five case studies of his works that were made for a monastic community, two individual clerics, a town hall and a bourgeois layman, thus providing rich evidence of patronage and audiences. The objective here is to examine how Bellegambe met the challenges posed by these commissions, and to gain further insight into the practice of a skilled artist who - rooted in a long line of craftsmanship and artistic tradition and in close collaboration with his colleagues and patrons - produced a body of highly original works.

This beautiful and extensively illustrated catalogue presents in-depth case studies of twenty-four rare and remarkable Late Medieval panel paintings, many from the German-speaking regions of Europe, but also from Spain, France and the Southern Netherlands. These works – often fragments of larger altarpieces designed for liturgical performance and communal or private devotion – can be monumental and dramatic or small and intimate, but all on close examination prove to be rich in meaning – even in cases where the painters remain anonymous, and the precise contexts of their creation have become obscured or fragmented. The collected essays will encompass a broad spectrum of artistic styles, techniques, and interests, including in some instances the works’ original frames, and the attendant meanings they give to the imagery housed within. The group will also be augmented by a rare and important small-scale tapestry altarpiece with close links to panel painting. The inclusion of such a piece, one of the many newly resurfaced works to be included in the catalogue, will offer an innovative approach to the scholarship of Medieval paintings, and enrich our understanding of the cross-pollination of ideas between mediums and the role played by painters in tapestry production at the turn of the sixteenth century. The book, a follow-up to Susie Nash’s important 2011 catalogue, considers the physical history, original form, condition and technique of the assembled works, using wood analysis and dendrochronology, paint samples, infrared, x-rays and macro photography to document the materials and methods involved in their making and the alterations and transformations they have undergone with time. This new information is combined with close readings of their imagery and its presentation to explore issues of meaning, creative process, patronal intervention and artistic intention, leading in many cases to new reconstructions, attributions, dates and iconographic readings. The text is extensively illustrated with a series of images of all of the works, along with technical photographs and comparative material.

For the catalogue of the 1965 monographic exhibition in Rotterdam and Bruges on Jan Gossart (ca. 1472-1532) a compilation was made of 68 documentary references pertaining to the artist's life and works. Now, forty-five years later, there has been a reassessment of Gossart and his oeuvre which has resulted in a new catalogue raisonne, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance. The present text, Jan Gossart: The Documentary Evidence accompanies this volume. This tome covers more than 130 documents, including inventories, accounts, biographies, descriptions and other records about Gossart's life and works, up until the mid-18th century. These mainly archival records have been re-examined and transcribed anew, and subsequently discovered documents have been added. Each transcription is accompanied by a short description and comment as well as published references. The book includes photographs of original records. Additionally, two of Gossart's works for which most of our knowledge is based on documentary evidence are discussed: the so-called Salamanca Triptych and the famous, now lost, Middelburg Altarpiece.