(Oudewater 1460 - Bruges 1523)
The Flemish painter Gerard David was the last great master of the Bruges School, where he established in 1483 and received the influence of Hans Memling, whose clients he inherited. The magistrate of the city commissioned him two works about justice: The Judgement of Cambyses and The Flaying of Sisamnes (Bruges Museum). In Bruges he studied the main artworks by the Van Eyck brothers and by Rogier van der Weyden among other painters.
Gerard’s religious works are characterized by both a serious solemnity and a softness and devotion; as we can see in the artworks The Marriage at Cana (Louvre Museum), The Virgin Among the Virgins (1509, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen), Canon Bernardijn Salviati and Three Saints (National Gallery, London), Deposition (Chapel of the Holy Blood, Bruges), Madonna and Child with the Milk Soup (Brussels), Baptism of Christ (1500- 1507, Bruges Museum) and Rest during the Flight to Egypt (El Prado Museum, Madrid).
In Gerard’s last artworks, the treatment of religious subjects was more humanized and intimate, which was caused by the influence of Quentin Metsys. Gerard was a very controversial artist, he was both criticised by people who thought that his recovering of the archaic model was due to his lack of artistic skills and defended by those ones who considered him an artist that was trying to find the tools for advancing in painting in the Great Masters’ works.
