The cycle of Catalan and Spanish art in Sardinia

In 1326, the Castle of Cagliari, a thriving city of Pisan education and culture, was finally handed over to the Aragonese. For all intents and purposes, this date closes, not only for Cagliari but for most of Sardinia, the cycle of medieval artistic civilization marked by Italic presences.

Starting from this date, cultural references are gradually, but increasingly decisively, oriented towards the Iberian side.
To follow the entire evolution of the Catalan direction in Sardinian painting to the point of its exhaustion, however, it is necessary to go far beyond the historical duration of the kingdom of Aragon, because in reality only on the threshold of the seventeenth century did the cycle of the function assumed by the Hispanic Gothic polyptych from the first introduction, around the middle of the 14th century, in the Cagliari churches come to fruition.

While the architecture includes a perfect and current Gothic-Catalan monument in the Sanctuary of Bonaria, built between 1324 and 1326 in the place where the Aragonese camped to besiege the Pisans in the Castle of Cagliari, the story of the pictorial polyptych could instead begin not before the effective penetration of Catalan culture into the island.
In fact, in the second half of the fourteenth century, Catalan painting was exported to Sardinia and Catalan painters worked in Cagliari and Alghero, even if their presence can be reconstructed not on the basis of surviving pictorial works, but through archival evidence.

Since the beginning of the fifteenth century, archival news has been accompanied by concrete survivals of Catalan pictorial works, which finally give the opportunity to outline a history of painting in Sardinia, no longer on sporadic, disappeared or hypothetical materials, but on the presence of artists documented by their works.
The Sardinian late Gothic polyptych (“retablo”) has in the center a niche with the statue of the Virgin, surrounded by painted wooden compartments, adorned with golden stucco frames and completed by dust and a predella to a horizontal development. Some of the most important come from the destroyed church of San Francesco di Stampace and are now in the National Art Gallery of Cagliari.

The beginnings of Sardinian late Gothic painting saw Catalan artists send their works to Sardinia between 1350 and 1450. These include Joan Mates, who performs the “Altarpiece of the Annunciation” for the homonymous chapel in San Francesco di Stampace, and the anonymous painter of the Altarpiece of San Martino in Oristano, now preserved in the Antiquarium Arborense. In the first twenty years of the fifteenth century, the Tuscan-trained Portuguese Alvaro Pirez painted a polyptych for the church of San Domenico in Cagliari, of which remains a Madonna and Child with refined late Gothic linearisms (National Art Gallery of Cagliari).

After 1450, various Iberian artists settled on the island to work there. In 1455, the Catalan painters Rafael Thomas and Joan Figuera opened a workshop in Cagliari with the task of creating the “Altarpiece of San Bernardino” for Saint Francis of Stampace. Joan Barcelo, on the other hand, had settled in Sassari, documented between 1488 and 1516: his “Altarpiece of the Visitation”, from the homonymous chapel of Saint Francis of Stampace, mixes Valencian and Flemish cultural elements. Still unknown but dependent on him is the master who paints the “Altarpiece of the Crib” (from Saint Francis of Stampace), in bright shades of color and flashy Spanish-Flemish golden backgrounds.

A new, more modern sense of light and space appears in the works of the important Master of Castelsardo, who takes its name from the altarpiece painted for the cathedral in that center, who also wrote the “Altarpiece of Saint Peter” for the parish church of Tuili (dated 1500) and that of the “Porziuncola” in San Francesco di Stampace in Cagliari. Giovanni Muru, author of the predella of the “Great Altarpiece of Ardara” (1515), depends stylistically on him.

Update

26/9/2023 - 00:20