The Department of Art and Design’s Dr. Mitzi Kirkland-Ives, professor of art history and visual culture, has published her latest research on the fifteenth-century German painter Hans Memling.

Released in April 2025 through Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, “Hans Memling and the Merchants,” takes readers into Memling’s world in Bruges, Belgium, far from the courts and churches that usually defined artistic success.

Vibrant career in fifteenth century Bruges

Kirkland-Ives noted that instead of painting for kings or cardinals, Memling found his audience within the rising urban middle class among bankers, politicians and artisans. He subsequently built a thriving career in Bruges.

“He’s an interesting figure,” she said. “He’s not originally from the Low Countries, but he shows up in Bruges and winds up being one of the most called upon painters of his moment there.”

The book builds on Kirkland-Ives’s long-standing interest in the intersections of art, ritual and society in late medieval Europe. Her previous book, “In the Footsteps of Christ: Hans Memling’s Passion Narratives and the Devotional Imagination in the Early Modern Netherlands,” offers a close study of Memling’s narrative strategies and the ways viewers engaged with images as part of their devotional lives.

In that book, Kirkland-Ives invites readers to consider how a single panel painting could guide the imagination through complex religious experience.

She expands on this theme further in her new book by exploring the social and material realities of Memling’s world.

This includes how his workshop operated, how he sourced his pigments and how his portraits and altarpieces reflected the politics and power plays within Bruges. In fact, Memling’s works often elevated an individual’s or a family’s status or publicly demonstrated status that they already had.

Bruges was an international hotspot at the time, Kirkland-Ives noted. Memling’s client list reflected this. His work traveled across Europe—from Castile to Florence—thanks to a system of patrons who often ordered pieces while visiting and had them shipped home.

The world of art also a business operation

Kirkland-Ives attributes some of Memling’s success to being in the right place at the right time.

Yet “he was open to suggestions and showed really particular stylistic concessions to artistic traditions outside Bruges,” she added.

Another thread in the book is the reminder that art, then as now, was also a business. “The trade guilds in the city operated a lot like unions do today,” Kirkland-Ives cited as one example.

Memling’s workshop also found ways to “economize” when demand was high, she said, sometimes even simulating gold leaf with carefully placed yellow and white paint.

Accordingly, “Hans Memling and the Merchants” demonstrates how art in the fifteenth century wasn’t just about beauty or devotion. It was about visibility, power and adaptability.

“Making art for the market isn’t selling out,” Kirkland-Ives noted. “It’s just the way it really always has been.”

Learn more about the art history and visual culture degree

Photos courtesy of Department of Art and Design.

News edited by the Reynolds College Communications Team.

Sam Barnette is a writer for the Department of Art and Design. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Missouri State’s Department of Communication, Media, Journalism and Film. She is working toward an MS in Data Science and Analytic Storytelling at Truman State University.