Portrait of a Man with an Arrow

This small panel is one of the most arresting of the early Netherlandish portraits gathered in the National Gallery of Art. Hans Memling, who learned his craft in Bruges in the circle of Rogier van der Weyden, shows an unknown young man holding an arrow across his breast, a detail that has puzzled historians for centuries, though it is generally read as the emblem of Saint Sebastian, a patron of plague victims, or as an attribute of youthful energy. Painted about 1470 to 1475, the work shows Memling at the height of his powers, rendering the sitter with the precise, luminous detail that made Bruges the centre of Northern painting in the fifteenth century.