Hans Memling and the Merchants

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A social history of the fifteenth-century German painter’s influence. Emigrating from southern Germany in the late fifteenth century, painter Hans Memling sought success in the vibrant commercial hub of Bruges. He found an audience, not among the nobility or clergy, but in the newly emerging urban middle class: bankers, financiers, politicians, and artisans. His work, therefore, reached a diverse community across Europe—in Castile, England, Genoa, Bologna and Florence. This book explores the social and material aspects of Memling’s career and workshop as a window into Bruges’s rise as an early modern commercial hub, rife with international trade, factional politics, artisanal guilds, devotional conflict, and a burgeoning middle-class clientele.