The Last Judgment

Hans Memling's Last Judgment triptych, painted around 1469-1471 and now in the National Museum in Gdańsk, Poland, is one of the most monumental works of Netherlandish painting. Originally commissioned by the Medici banker Angelo Tani for a church in Fiesole, the altarpiece was seized by Hanseatic pirates en route to Italy in 1473 and taken to Gdańsk, where it has remained ever since. The central panel's Christ in Judgment surrounded by rising blessed and falling damned is profoundly indebted to Rogier van der Weyden.

Memling manages the enormous triptych with compositional clarity, using the archangel Michael as a pivotal central figure and filling the wings with hundreds of individualized figures rendered with his characteristic smooth, refined oil technique.