Saint Lawrence

Saint Lawrence was a deacon (an ordained minister below the rank of priest) and so is dressed in a white alb and a rich red dalmatic with fringed edges and gold bands woven into the fabric. He holds a book and the grill on which he was martyred.This panel was the right wing of a triptych painted by Hans Memling around 1480 for Benedetto Pagagnotti of Florence. The central panel shows the Virgin and Child and is now in the Uffizi, Florence, while the left wing is also in the National Gallery’s collection: Saint John the Baptist. The architectural setting, the tiled floor and the step on which Saint Lawrence stands ran across the whole triptych, so that all the figures seem to inhabit a continuous space.There is a dramatic difference between the infrared reflectograms for Saint Lawrence, which show very few changes, and those for John the Baptist, which reveal rather free underdrawing. This surprising contrast may be explained by the circumstances of the commission. Pagagnotti’s representative would have specified that these two saints should be included, and while Memling could have shown him many figures of the Baptist, Saint Lawrence was not so widely depicted and there seems to have been no model for him in the workshop. Memling would presumably have produced a preliminary design especially for this figure, which would have been approved by the commissioner and which would then have been copied carefully onto the panel, avoiding the need for extensive underdrawing.On the reverse, five cranes stand in a dark landscape, with the sun probably rising over the trees behind them. The birds are beautifully done and perhaps come from model books such as we know medieval artists used.