Permeabilità e specificità / appropriazioni e identità (1455–1515 ca.). L’affermazione del linguaggio flandro-mediterraneo nel regno catalanoaragonese di Sardegna

Abstract

The Retable of Saint Bernardino, painted around 1455 for a Franciscan church in Cagliari, cannot be understood solely as a Gothic-Catalan altarpiece. It deserves attention for two attributes: first, its authors – Joan Figuera and Rafael Tomàs – were not local but came from abroad; second, it uses a composite visual language. The painters, though both were Catalans, applied ideas and modes of northern European origin, which were known to them through works such as the paintings of Lluís Dalmau, the Master of the Prado Redemption, and the Master of Collins Hours. The retable thus provides important evidence of the spread and penetration of Flemish-Iberian painting resulting from Sardinia’s geographic situation along the North/South axis, between Flemish inventions and Mediterranean modes. In the southern territories held by the Crown of Aragon (and of Italy), this confluence of styles and iconographic subjects proved valuable to both the monastic orders and the court. The Figuera-Tomàs retable, furthermore, is important also for its connections with manuscript illumination, and, in Aragonese Naples, with Niccolò Colantionio’s Retable of St Vincent Ferrer.