with van der Weyden and Christus little more than footnotes. Later many of the works then attributed to Memling were found to be from van der Weyden or his workshop. In 1902, Bruges hosted the first exhibition of Netherlandish art with 35,000 visitors, an event that was a "turning point in the appreciation of early Netherlandish art". For a number of reasons, the chief of which was the difficulty of securing paintings for the exhibition, only a few of van Eyck's and van der Weyden's panels were displayed, while almost 40 of Memling's pieces were shown. Nevertheless, van Eyck and van der Weyden, to an extent, were then considered the first rank of Netherlandish artists. The Bruges exhibition renewed interest in the period and initiated scholarship that was to flourish in the 20th century. Johan Huizinga was the first historian to place Netherlandish art squarely in the Burgundian period – outside of nationalistic borders – suggesting in his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, published in 1919, that the flowering of the school in the early 15th century resulted wholly from the tastes set by the Burgundian court. Another exhibition visitor, Georges Hulin de Loo, published an independent critical catalogue highlighting the large number of mistakes in the official catalogue, which had used attributions and descriptions from the owners. He and Max Friedländer, who visited and wrote a review of the Bruges exhibition, went on to become leading scholars in the field. Scholarship and conservation The most significant early research of Early Netherlandish art occurred in the 1920s, in German art historian Max Jakob Friedländer's pioneering Meisterwerke der Niederländischen Malerei des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts. Friedländer focused on the biographical details of the painters, establishing attribution, and examining their major works. The undertaking proved extremely difficult, given the scant historical record of even the most significant artists. Fellow-German Erwin Panofsky's analysis in the 1950s and 1960s followed and in many ways challenged Friedländer's work. Writing in the United States, Panofsky made the work of the German art historians accessible to the English-speaking world for the first time. He effectively legitimized Netherlandish art as a field of study, and raised its status to something similar to the early Italian renaissance. Panofsky was one of the first art historians to abandon formalism. He built on Friedländer's attempts at attribution, but focused more on social history and religious iconography. Panofsky developed the