Memling’s Italian patrons. Characters, trades, and networks of ‘Little Italy’ in Medieval Bruges

Since Aby Warburg’s first iconographical analysis of the Florentine patrons of Hans Memling (1902), the merchants, bankers, and businessmen of the Italian community, the ‘Little Italy’, in Bruges during the Medieval Age have always benefited from a remarkable historiographical fortune. Despite the lack of any documentary evidence on the relations between the painter and his Italian patrons, it is during the 20th century that thanks to the analysis of archival sources, the life, businesses, and the personality of some of those patrons have become more familiar to us. Particularly enlightening were the research originated from the publication of the correspondence of the Medici Bank in Bruges by Armand Grunzweig (1931), as the study of Raymond de Roover on the rise and decline of the Medici Bank (1963), and the refined restitution of Tommaso Portinari personality and career by Marc Boone (1999). Strengthened by this solid critical tradition and observing their portraits made by Memling and his colleagues during the last decades of XV century, the aim of this paper is to add some new documentary evidence on these ascertained and potential patrons coming from Lille Chamber of Accounts, by defining their characters, trades and networks between Italy, Flanders and United Kingdom.