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. [Read more…] about Dr. Mitzi Kirkland-Ives publishes new book on Hans Memling
