Portrait of Maria Portinari is a 1470–72 painting by Hans Memling in tempera and oil on oak panel. It portrays Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, about whom very little is known. The panel is the right wing of a devotional and hinged triptych; the lost center panel is recorded in sixteenth-century inventories as a Virgin and Child.
About Portrait of Maria Portinari in brief
Portrait of Maria Portinari is a 1470–72 painting by Hans Memling in tempera and oil on oak panel. It portrays Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, about whom very little is known. The panel is the right wing of a devotional and hinged triptych; the lost center panel is recorded in sixteenth-century inventories as a Virgin and Child. The left panel depicts Tommaso, a member of a prominent Florentine family. 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 necklace identical to those in her depiction in Hugo van der Goes’s later Port inari Altarpiece, a painting that may have been partly based on Memling’s portrait. Maria’s frame is slightly trompe-l’œil compared to her head, a common characteristic of contemporary northern portraiture, also found in works by Roger van der Weyden and Petrus Christus Rogus.
Her elbows rest on an unseen parapet that coincides with the lower edge of the painted stone frame, acting as a tromp-lœl which sits closer to the viewer in reality in this work. The portrait was commissioned by the art-loving Tomm as the right-hand wing of the triptyCh. The central panel is lost; some art historians suggest it may have was his Virgin and child in the National Gallery, London. The half-length portrait shows Maria Port in a three-quarter view turned to the left. She is placed against a flat, opaque, dark background, with her hands clasped in prayer. Maria would have been around 14 years old at the time the painting was commissioned, either the year of her marriage in 1470 or shortly after. She was executor to her husband’s will but her fate thereafter is uncertain.
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This page is based on the article Portrait of Maria Portinari published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
