Past Exhibition

Hans Memling's Saint John the Baptist and Saint Veronica

A woman sitting close to us in front of a deep landscape holds up a white cloth with the image of a man’s face on it in this vertical painting. The woman and the image on the cloth both have pale skin, hooded eyes, and long, straight noses. The woman’s shoulders are squared toward us, and her legs are tucked under her. Her head tips slightly to our right. Her eyes are downcast, and her bow-shaped lips are parted. She wears a white, turban-like headdress with a white veil covering her neck and upper chest. Her rose-pink dress is mostly covered by a voluminous, lapis-blue robe falling from the back of the headdress to the ground, where it puddles in angular folds. On the white cloth she holds up, the man’s head has chin-length blond hair and a beard. He looks out at us with light brown eyes. The woman sits on a grassy field. A dirt path cuts through a shallow valley across the picture, not far behind the woman. More harvest-yellow and moss-green hills roll back to a town with gray stone buildings with blue roofs along the horizon, which comes three-quarters of the way up the composition. The sky above deepens from white at the horizon to azure blue across the top of the painting.
Hans Memling, Saint Veronica [obverse], c. 1470/1475, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.46.a

Details

  • Dates

    -

  • Locations

    West Building, Main Floor, Gallery 39
A woman sitting close to us in front of a deep landscape holds up a white cloth with the image of a man’s face on it in this vertical painting. The woman and the image on the cloth both have pale skin, hooded eyes, and long, straight noses. The woman’s shoulders are squared toward us, and her legs are tucked under her. Her head tips slightly to our right. Her eyes are downcast, and her bow-shaped lips are parted. She wears a white, turban-like headdress with a white veil covering her neck and upper chest. Her rose-pink dress is mostly covered by a voluminous, lapis-blue robe falling from the back of the headdress to the ground, where it puddles in angular folds. On the white cloth she holds up, the man’s head has chin-length blond hair and a beard. He looks out at us with light brown eyes. The woman sits on a grassy field. A dirt path cuts through a shallow valley across the picture, not far behind the woman. More harvest-yellow and moss-green hills roll back to a town with gray stone buildings with blue roofs along the horizon, which comes three-quarters of the way up the composition. The sky above deepens from white at the horizon to azure blue across the top of the painting.
Hans Memling, Saint Veronica [obverse], c. 1470/1475, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.46.a

Overview: A focus exhibition brought together Saint John the Baptist, from the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and Saint Veronica, from the collection of the National Gallery, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Memling's death. The panels, owned in the early 16th century by the Bembo family, are believed to have been part of the same small altarpiece. Raphael's Saint George and the Dragon from the Gallery's collection was included in the exhibition to illustrate Memling's influence on Italian painting.

Organization: Curator of the exhibition was John Hand, curator of northern Renaissance paintings at the National Gallery of Art.

Sponsor: The brochure was made possible by The Circle of the National Gallery of Art.

Attendance: 82,389

Brochure: Hans Memling's Saint John the Baptist and Saint Veronica, by John Oliver Hand. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1994.

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