On the right kneels the donor, still anonymous, but without doubt the same person as portrayed with his small son in the almost contemporary diptych of Bucharest.

Memling’s portraiture is certainly one of the more successful specialities of his art; we can see this in the lively head of the donor in prayer, portrayed minutely and caught with extreme immediacy.

This “Compassion” reveals the youthful apprenticeship which Memling had to undergo at Brussels with Rogier van der Weyden. The work is a fairly recent acquisition; it was bought by Andrea V Doria Pamphilj from the Roman painter Luigi Cochetti, together with four other fifteenth-century works, including the important “panel of the Master of Borgo alla Collina”, for the sum of 7500 scudi.

This acquisition enriched the collection with important fifteenth-century pictures, in accordance with the new nineteenth-century liking for gold ground and the so-called “primitives”. The panel by Memling, one of his most important works, was published in 1899 and shown at the great 1902 exhibition at Bruges on the painting of the Flemish primitives, a collection in which no less than forty of the master’s paintings were on display.

The Doria panel has not yet been precisely dated, but is from around the 1480-90. Most critics, however, see in this work the advanced maturity of the artist, which would mean a date after 1480, some years later that the Reins Triptych (Bruges, Hans Memling Museum), signed and dated 1479; this also depicts a “Compassion”, whose composition is very similar to that of the Doria version.