LAURA D. GELFAND jn^^ a jz? rg? n and Child purportedly by the hand of Hans Memling (fig. i) 1 entered the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art and was published in a laudatory essay in the museum's Bulletin in November of that year. Following this auspicious beginning, however, the painting received relatively little scholarly attention and has been infrequently reproduced. 2 Its attribution has since been changed, and it is now thought to be a product of Hans Memling's workshop rather than an autograph work by the master. 3 Despite this neglect and altered attribution, the panel is worthy of another, deeper examination. Studying the context surrounding its production? who might have originally owned it and how it might have functioned for its owner? provides us with an opportunity to gain a clearer understanding of painting in Bruges in the second half of the fifteenth century. In the Cleveland Madonna and Child the Virgin suckles her child. Mary looks down to observe her son, but his attention is drawn by some thing outside the picture, to the viewer's right. He is so taken with the object of his attention that he seems to lift his right hand in a gesture of recognition. This composition indicates that the panel was once half of a devotional portrait diptych, which would have included a portrait of its original owner in prayer on an adjoining panel. 4 This combination of two paintings, a Madonna and child and a portrait of the owner, was un known before about 1400 but became a popular devotional image during the fifteenth century in the Burgundian Netherlands. 5 The Cleveland panel would have been joined with a set of hinges to the owner's portrait, and the diptych could then have been opened and closed like a book. 6 Although ascertaining, with any degree of precision, how devotional ob jects were used is notoriously difficult, images that include diptychs show them hanging in private chapels or within the curtain folds of four-poster beds. 7 The diptychs could have been closed for protection when not in use or while being transported. The small scale of devotional diptychs facili tated their mobility.