Portrait of a Man (Memling)

A composed young man, his hands just visible, sits before an open landscape of meadows, water, and a far tower under a blue sky. Memling, the leading portraitist of Bruges, helped make fashionable the setting of a sitter against deep countryside rather than a blank dark ground, an idea that traveled to Italy and back. The patient realism is wholly Netherlandish: every strand of hair, the steady gaze, the modeling built in oil glazes. Compare Antonello da Messina's Portrait of a Man, elsewhere in this collection, which carries just this Flemish manner south - the two stand as evidence of a continent-wide exchange in how a face could be painted.