November 11, 2005

The Lie of the Portrait

By LAURIE FENDRICH

While Italian Renaissance artists in the early 15th century were slowly groping their way toward believable realism, their counterparts in the north of Europe soared ahead of them with their own kind of pictorial illusion. The German-born painter Hans Memling, who worked for most of his life in Flanders, was one of several 15th-century artists who were conspicuously good at not only the requisite religious pictures, but also secular portraiture that exquisitely replicated hundreds of the

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