Portrait of Maria Portinari

Hans Memling's Portrait of Maria Portinari, painted around 1470 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts the wife of Tommaso Portinari, the Medici bank manager in Bruges. Maria Baroncelli married Tommaso in 1470, and this portrait may be a marriage portrait. The Portinari family were among the most important Italian patrons of Netherlandish art—Tommaso also commissioned Hugo van der Goes's monumental Portinari Altarpiece, now in the Uffizi.

Memling renders Maria with refined elegance, capturing the fashionable Burgundian hennin headdress and jeweled necklace with precise detail, while the smooth flesh tones and gentle expression exemplify his approach to female portraiture.