The Shrine of St. Ursula is a carved and gilded wooden reliquary containing oil on panel inserts (87x33x91 cm) by Hans Memling. Dating to c. 1489, it is housed in the Hans Memling Museum in the Old St. John's Hospital (Sint-Janshospitaal), Bruges, in the Flemish Region of modern-day Belgium.
The work was commissioned by the Hospital of St. John, the current museum's seat. Differently from other works by Memling, such as the Triptych of the Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine or the Florens Triptych, it is neither signed nor dated. It was a container for Saint Ursula's relics which was shown publicly only on her feast day. The relics were solemnly put in the shrine on 21 November 1489.
Virgin and Child
Description
The shrine is in the shape of a Gothic chapel, according to a customary format used in goldsmithing. It has a steeply pointed cover, as typical of northern European countries, with three painted tondos on each side. Attributed to Memling's workshop, they depict, on one side, the First Eleven Virgins with the Pope, a Cardinal, a Bishop and Etherius (characters of the saint's legend); on the other side, the Coronation of the Virgin with the Holy Trinity.
Arrival in Rome
The two "façades" contain the representations of the Virgin and Child between Two Nuns (the two donors, including the abbess), and St. Ursula Protecting the Holy Virgins. Both the scenes are embedded within a painted niche which simulates a perspective interior of the shrine.
At the sides, under two small arcades, are six scenes of the life and martyrdom of St. Ursula, which resemble the style of the stained glasses in contemporary churches. They include:
Arrival in Cologne
Arrival in Basel
Arrival in Rome
Leaving from Basel
Martyrdom of the Pilgrims
Martyrdom of St. Ursula
The scenes share the same pictorial background, set in northern German cities (such as Cologne, with the unfinished Cathedral) and painted with great attention to today's life details.
The decoration is completed by the carvings in International Gothic style, including pinnacles, holed friezes and, on the piers at the corners, the saints James, John the Evangelist, Agnes and Elizabeth of Hungary.
Sources
Zuffi, Stefano (2004). Il Quattrocento. Milan: Electa. ISBN88-370-2315-4.
Hans Memling was a German-Flemish painter who worked in the tradition of Early Netherlandish painting. Born in the Middle Rhine region, he probably spent his childhood in Mainz. During his apprenticeship as a painter he moved to the Netherlands and spent time in the Brussels workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. In 1465 he was made a citizen of Bruges, where he became one of the leading artists and the master of a large workshop. A tax document from 1480 lists him among the wealthiest citizens. Memling's religious works often incorporated donor portraits of the clergymen, aristocrats, and burghers who were his patrons. These portraits built upon the styles which Memling learned in his youth.
Ursula was a Romano-British virgin and martyr possibly of royal origin. She is venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion. Her feast day in the pre-1970 General Roman Calendar and in some regional calendars of the ordinary form of the Roman Rite is 21 October.
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The Master of the Legend of St. Ursula (1436–1505) was a Flemish painter active in the fifteenth century. His name is derived from a polyptych depicting scenes from the life of Saint Ursula painted for the convent of the Black Sisters of Bruges. The city appears in the background of a number of the paintings, in which the belfry and tower of the Church of Notre-Dame are visible. Consequently, it is possible, given the stages of construction of the belfry, to determine that the altarpiece was painted either before 1483 or somewhere between 1493 and 1499. The Netherlands Institute for Art History hold his birth and death dates to be those of Pieter Casenbroot, who was registered in the Bruges guild of saddlemakers and sculptors in 1460. Today the panels have been dispersed to a number of museums around the world.
The Donne Triptych is a hinged-triptych altarpiece by the Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. It consists of five individual panel paintings: a central inner panel, and two double-sided wings. It was painted for the soldier, courtier and diplomat Sir John Donne, probably sometime between the late 1470s or early 1480s, and contains portraits of Donne, his wife and daughter. It is kept in the collection of the National Gallery, London, with the panels still in their original frames.
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The St John Altarpiece is a large oil-on-oak hinged-triptych altarpiece completed around 1479 by the Early Netherlandish master painter Hans Memling. It was commissioned in the mid-1470s in Bruges for the Old St. John's Hospital (Sint-Janshospitaal) during the building of a new apse. It is signed and dated 1479 on the original frame – its date of installation – and is today still at the hospital in the Memling museum.
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The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine is a c. 1480 oil-on-oak painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Virgin Mary sits on a throne in a garden holding the Child Jesus in her lap. Mother and child are flanked by angels playing musical instruments, with St Catherine of Alexandria to the left opposite St Barbara on the right. The male figure standing slightly behind the celestial group presumably commissioned the painting as a devotional donor portrait.
The Annunciation is an oil painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. It depicts the Annunciation, the archangel Gabriel's announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive and become the mother of Jesus, described in the Gospel of Luke. The painting was executed in the 1480s and was transferred to canvas from its original oak panel sometime after 1928; it is today held in the Robert Lehman collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Pagagnotti Triptych is an oil-on-wood triptych by Hans Memling produced circa 1480. The original was disassembled and separated, with the center panel held at the Uffizi gallery in Florence and the two wing panels at the National Gallery in London.
The Master of the Legend of Saint Bruno is the "notname" of an anonymous Gothic painter who was active in Cologne in the late 15th century. He is best known for the cycle of paintings on canvas produced for Cologne Charterhouse after which he is named.
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