Hugo van der Goes

Hugo van der Goes (c. 1440–1482) painted with an emotional intensity that set him apart from every other Early Netherlandish master, and the intensity eventually broke him. Nothing certain is known about his life before 1467, when he joined the painters' guild in Ghent. He rose quickly, becoming dean of the guild and receiving important commissions, including decorations for the marriage of Charles the Bold in Bruges. Then, at the height of his success in 1475, he entered the Red Cloister monastery near Brussels as a lay brother.

His masterpiece, the Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1474–76), was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, the Medici bank's agent in Bruges. The enormous triptych shows the Adoration of the Shepherds with unprecedented psychological realism. The shepherds' faces display raw wonder and awe; the still life of flowers in the foreground carries complex symbolism. When the altarpiece arrived in Florence in 1483, Italian painters were stunned. Its realism and emotional power influenced the development of Florentine Renaissance painting for decades.

Van der Goes continued painting in the monastery, but his mental state deteriorated. In 1481, returning from a trip to Cologne, he suffered a severe breakdown. A fellow monk, Gaspar Ofhuys, recorded that Hugo believed himself damned and tried to kill himself. The monks played music to calm him. He recovered enough to paint but died shortly after in 1482, leaving several works unfinished. His paintings hang at the Uffizi, which holds the Portinari Altarpiece, and at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Vincent van Gogh later identified with Hugo's troubled genius.