Hans Memling stands among the greatest masters of Netherlandish painting, a pivotal figure whose activity lies between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His Last Judgment is one of the most celebrated images of Western art, fusing an eschatological vision with profoundly human emotion and anatomical precision. Remarkably, this masterpiece, closely linked to the history of Gdańsk, is one of the very few works from Polish public collections to appear in virtually every art history textbook worldwide, making it a true ambassador of cultural heritage on the global stage. On September 25, a seminar dedicated to Memling and his legacy was held at the Scientific Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Rome. The event brought together specialists to reflect on the artist’s significance and on the extraordinary artistic, historical, and symbolic resonance of The Last Judgment, reaffirming its place in the history of European art, especially in Poland and Italy.

The event was organized by the the University of Silesia in Katowice, the University of Parma, and the Memling Research Center from the University of Gdańsk, thanks to the support from the National Science Centre (NCN, Poland 2022/47/D/HS2/01798), and the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED, RyC2023-042704I). The seminar was coordinated by Oskar J. Rojewski and Federica Veratelli, and brought together scholars, who examined Memling’s oeuvre in the Italian and Polish contexts, as well as its reception, preservation, and significance within the history of European art.

The seminar was motivated by the exhibition Hans Memling. Rinascimento Fiammingo, held in 2014 at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, curated by one of the speakers at the seminar, Till-Holger Borchert. The exhibition highlighted the connections between Memling’s Bruges workshop and patrons from the Mediterranean World, and the artistic exchange between the Low Countries and Italy in the late fifteenth century. More than ten years after the exhibition, the seminar provided an opportunity to reconsider Memling’s studies and to assess the impact of recent scholarship on the understanding of his work. The debates focused on issues of patronage, sources of commissions, the reception of works, conservation methods, and new directions in the field of Memling studies.

The seminar was developed in two sessions, the first one was devoted to the Triptych of the Last Judgment, a masterpiece originally commissioned for a chapel in Badia Fiesolana near Florence that due to the seizure of the ship that hold the painting by Paul Beneke, ended up in the city of Gdańsk. This painting, now in the National Museum in Gdańsk, served as a central point of reference for this meeting, and first three talks addressed its significance as a milestone. The talk by Beata Możejko The Great Caravel Peter von Danzig, Paul Beneke, and the Turbulent Circumstances of the Capture of the Triptych of the Last Judgment by Hans Memling, explained the historical context of the triptych’s in 1473 and discussed the political and economic background of this event, which linked Gdańsk to international networks of trade. Next, Melis Avkiran delivered a paper En Route to Heavenly Jerusalem: Pious Merchants in Hans Memling’s Last Judgement Triptych, exploring the theological meaning of the motif of Christ as the Merchant of Wisdom and the relationship between spirituality and commerce in late medieval art. She also compared visual depictions of merchants in the Italian tradition, such as Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes, highlighting how religious themes intertwined with civic and mercantile identities in late medieval and early Renaissance art. The first panel was concluded with the talk The Triptych of the Last Judgement and Its Gdańsk-Prussian Context in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century by Andrzej Woziński, who addressed the interpretations of the Memling’s last judgments within the Prussian art, presenting comparative material from sculpture and painting in St. Mary’s Church in Gdańsk. He connivingly demonstrated how local artists assimilated and reinterpreted Memling’s painting, as well as showed its significance for the visual arts on the Baltic shores.

After the break, the event followed with four talks that stressed, first, workshop practices of Hans Memling. Till-Holger Borchert in his presentation The Afterlife of an Artist: Workshop, Followers, and Imitators of Hans Memling, emphasized the importance of distinguishing Memling’s autograph works from those produced in his workshop, which reflected both his style and the broader realities of late fifteenth-century artistic production in Bruges, and beyond. This talk was followed by the study of the Italian collectors of Memling’s works by Federica Veratelli. She discussed patrons such as Angelo Tani, Tommaso and Benedetto Portinari, and Bernardo Bembo, tracing the routes by which the Flemish master’s paintings reached Italy and how they were viewed within Florentine and Venetian circles. Third speaker, Oskar J. Rojewski explained his study on the attribution challenges in portraits related either to Memling or his pupil Michel Sittow of Reval (Tallinn). By comparing paintings from the Getty Museum and the National Museum in Cracow – Czartoryski Museum, he highlighted the difficulties in distinguishing between the master’s and the pupil’s styles, emphasizing the implications of such analyses for the study of portraiture. The final paper, delivered by Gianluca Poldi, titled The Underdrawing of Hans Memling: A Few Notes and Perspectives, explained how to analyse underdrawings in Memling’s works, particularly in the case of the central Crucifixion scene from the Jan Crabbe Triptych in the Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza, as well as in the Last Judgment Triptych from Gdańsk. He stressed the significance of analytical techniques, such as infrared reflectography (IRR), in reconstructing the creative process of the Flemish master.

The seminar engaged the audience, especially in the discussion that demonstrated one more time that Hans Memling’s oeuvre remains a reference point for contemporary research into the artistic culture of late medieval and early Europe. The conference also showed that interest in Memling extends beyond art history, integrating historical, conservation, and technological perspectives, and confirming the relevance of his art in modern scholarship.

Karolina Prykowska