The work of Bartolomé Bermejo and the Master of La Seu d’Urgell shows certain coincidences that question the boundaries of historiographical labels and stylistic categories, despite their instrumental value. Both artists were receptive to the incorporation of new figurative models, with which they became familiar, thanks largely to being itinerant painters. Furthermore, the context of their work is the transition between Gothic art and the Renaissance. The work of both artists, more pronounced in the case of Bermejo, may be considered a watershed between the two realities, and it reveals one of the distinctive features of the museum’s collection from this period: the appearance of a hybrid language that reflects the coexistence of compositional formulas and solutions originating in both cultures.

Bartolomé Bermejo and Lluís Desplà: Elective Affinities

The presence in Barcelona of Bartolomé Bermejo, one of the greatest painters to work for the Crown of Aragon, was an episode of great significance for the artistic history of Barcelona. His arrival was due to the patronage of Archdeacon Lluís Desplà, who commissioned a painting for his private chapel in 1490: the Desplà Pietà. Two years later, Jaume Huguet, the most eminent representative of late Gothic painting, died in Barcelona.

Bermejo, an artist with an immensely rich visual culture, thanks to the assimilation of the Flemish tradition, found in Desplà the intelligent support of a patron whose cultural prominence was based on the introduction of the new values of the Renaissance: the fame, the public virtue and the commitment to a practice of art collecting that reinstated the Classical ideals.

The Master of La Seu d’Urgell, an artist open to Flanders and France

The Master of La Seu d’Urgell is a highly original painter who evokes figurative and compositional models developed in Flanders and France. Like Bermejo, he incorporates the Flemish idiom naturally. This influence appears along with figurative and compositional similarities from French culture.

The museum conserves almost all the painted serge cloths from the organ in the cathedral of La Seu d’Urgell, one of its most emblematic works, for both their artistic value and the type. This set of cloths adorned the organ’s doors and protected it from the inclemency of the weather. The use of grisaille, of an almost monochromatic colour scheme, had devotional significance and was adapted to the liturgical calendar, which, as a sign of penance, made it necessary during Lent to reduce the time during which the sacred coloured images were displayed and the time set aside for playing music.