Tommaso di Folco Portinari (1428–1501); Maria Portinari (Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, born 1456)

The Portinari portraits are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where they entered the collection through a 1913 donation by collector Benjamin Altman, who had purchased the work in New York from the dealer Kleinberger in 1910. Earlier provenance traces the panels through the Portinari-Salviati palace in Florence, a 1544 bequest by Tommaso's son Francesco to the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, the collection of Prince Anatole Demidoff of San Donato, and successive sales in 1870 and 1901 through dealers including Agnew in London and Léopold Goldschmidt in Paris. A documented exhibition history includes the Exposition des primitifs flamands à Bruges.

The Portinari portraits by Hans Memling belong to Early Netherlandish painting and are catalogued as wings of a devotional triptych, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work adapts the devotional diptych model introduced by Rogier van der Weyden into a triptych format, with a lost central Madonna and Child. According to French scholarship, the refined and sumptuous character of the panels suggests the work was intended not solely for private devotion but for a restricted audience, likely at the Portinari residence of Hof Bladelin in Bruges.

Tommaso Portinari, a Medici bank representative in Bruges from 1465 and a prominent figure in the Florentine colony, was familiar with Charles the Bold. The painting was exhibited at the Exposition des primitifs flamands à Bruges. Provenance research traces the work through the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, the Demidoff collection, and Benjamin Altman, who donated it to the Met in 1913.

The Portinari portraits entered Florence by an unknown date and remained in the Portinari-Salviati palace until Tommaso's death in 1501, after which they were recorded as part of the family's devotional ensemble. In 1544 Francesco Portinari bequeathed them to Florence's Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, where they stayed until the Napoleonic confiscations. By 1870 they had passed through private hands and were sold with an attribution to Dirk Bouts.

Rediscovered in Rome around 1900 by Elia Volpi, they briefly returned to Florence before entering the London and Paris art markets. Acquired by Benjamin Altman in New York in 1913, they were donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they became a touchstone for scholarship on Early Netherlandish portraiture and donor iconography. Their refined scale and sumptuous detail have sustained scholarly attention as a paradigm of Memling's portrait style and of fifteenth-century devotional portraiture.

This diptych, created by Hans Memling around 1470, presents individual portraits of Tommaso di Folco Portinari and his wife, Maria Maddalena Baroncelli. Executed in oil paint, the two panels are now housed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work exemplifies the detailed realism characteristic of Northern Renaissance portraiture, capturing the likenesses and social standing of its Florentine subjects.