Altarpiece of the Saints John

Bernat Martorell's Altarpiece of the Saints John from around 1430 is the masterwork of this Catalan painter, painted for the Guild of Glove-makers in Barcelona and depicting the two saints John — the Baptist and the Evangelist — in multiple narrative panels of extraordinary refinement. Martorell was the dominant painter in Catalonia in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, combining the International Gothic style's decorative richness with increasing spatial naturalism derived from French and possibly Flemish sources. His figures have a distinctive elongated elegance and emotional expressiveness that characterized the best Catalan painting of the period, when the Crown of Aragon's extensive Mediterranean connections gave Barcelonan artists access to the most sophisticated European artistic developments. The altarpiece demonstrates the high achievement of Iberian Gothic painting outside the main Italian and Flemish centers.

Martorell's technique combines the decorative richness of Catalan Gothic tradition—gold grounds, vivid colors—with new naturalistic details in landscape and architecture that reflect awareness of contemporary Netherlandish developments.