Piedad with Canon Lluís Desplà

Bartolomé Bermejo's Pietà with Canon Lluís Desplà, painted around 1490 and now in the Barcelona Cathedral, is considered the masterpiece of 15th-century Spanish painting. The extraordinary landscape behind the Pietà group—with its fantastical rocky formations and detailed Netherlandish-style city—creates a visionary setting unique in European art. Canon Desplà, an influential Barcelona clergyman, kneels beside the mourning group in a portrait of extraordinary psychological intensity.

Bermejo's virtuoso oil technique produces luminous surfaces with extraordinary detail in the landscape, jeweled vestments, and anatomical rendering, achieving a technical mastery of the Netherlandish oil medium unmatched by any other Spanish painter of his era.