The Ottana shovel

The Ottana altarpiece, detail

Due to its geographical location between Spain and Italy, Sardinia has often been an essential stop along maritime traffic and in the flow of Mediterranean culture between Barcelona and Naples. To document this centrality in the Mediterranean in the artistic field, the presence - in the former cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Ottana - of the “Altarpiece of Saints Francis of Assisi and Nicola di Bari” is worth it.
Datable between 1339 and 1344 due to the presence of Bishop Silvestro, a Franciscan, and for the portrait of a “little donnicello” (heir to the throne) from Arborea, whom the inscription identifies as the future Mariano IV de Bas-Serra, father of Eleonora di Arborea.
The “Pala di Ottana” is the first certain document of a Sardinian courtly client to a continental offer. Its importance is defined in relation to the reflection of cultural attitudes and ideological positions of the Catalan and Neapolitan courts - those supported by Sancha, wife of Roberto d'Angiò, who encouraged the preaching of her brother, Brother Philip of Mallorca in Campania - and to the tangible sign of the vitality of a medium, the Franciscan one, destined from now on to play a fundamental role with respect to artistic imports into the island.
Finally, to accept the attributive proposal put forward in 1969 by Ferdinando Bologna, who recognizes in the Ottana polyptych the capital work of the so-called Master of Franciscan Tempering, a Lorenzetti painter active in Naples between 1330 and 1345, it is not only in the direction of the Levantine side that one must look at, but also towards Naples: it is along the Mediterranean routes between Naples and the Iberian coast, which began in the first half of the 14th century the flow of Italian styles and Hispanic cultural attitudes into Sardinia.

Update

8/6/2026 - 13:52