Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos

Joan Mates was a Catalan painter active in Barcelona in the first decades of the fifteenth century, working in the International Gothic style that connected Catalonia to the broader Franco-Italian-Flemish current of European painting. This Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos — the aged apostle on the Aegean island where he received the visions of the Book of Revelation — was likely a panel from a larger altarpiece. John is traditionally shown on Patmos with an eagle (his symbol) and the book of Revelation, and Mates's treatment would follow this iconographic program within the elegant, refined vocabulary of Catalan Gothic.

Catalan International Gothic painting of this period favors elongated figures, elegant hands, and carefully descriptive faces over monumental spatial ambition. The landscape of Patmos — rocky island, water, sky — gave Catalan painters of this generation an opportunity to develop the atmospheric landscape backgrounds that would increasingly characterize Flemish-influenced devotional panel painting.