Maria Portinari

Very little is known about Maria Maddalena Baroncelli. She is aged about 14 years old, and depicted shortly before her wedding to the Italian banker Tommaso Portinari. 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 Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475), a painting that may have been partly based on Memling's portrait. 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 panels were commissioned by Tommaso, a member of a prominent Florentine family. Tommaso was an intimate of Charles the Bold and an ambitious manager of the Bruges branch of a bank controlled by Lorenzo de' Medici, and a well-known and active patron of Flemish art. Tommas eventually lost his position due to a series of large and risky unsecured loans given to Charles. Maria and Tommaso's portraits are hung alongside each other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.