Catalans and Aragonese in Sardinia

The Catalan-Aragonese rule conditioned the socio-political structure but also the cultural characteristics of art in Sardinia, determining the persistence of Gothic-Catalan architecture and late-Gothic Hispanic polyptych up to the late 17th century. The shape - like an altarpiece - is structured in a complex altarpiece, which combines architectural, sculptural and pictorial elements.

During the fourteenth century, archival records are found relating to Catalan painters active in Sardinia and to altarpieces painted for the island, but no work has survived.

The oldest altarpieces that have come down to us were painted in the first decades of the fifteenth century in Iberian workshops and exported to Sardinia. These are the Altarpiece of the Annunciation, attributed to the Catalan painter Joan Mates, one of the protagonists of international Gothic painting in Barcelona, and the Altarpiece of Saint Martin, attributed to an anonymous Iberian painter.

The combination of Italian-Iberian artistic culture and Flemish artistic culture is the fertile substrate on which a Sardinian artistic culture developed after 1450. Between 1455 and 1456, the San Bernardino Altarpiece was painted in Cagliari by two Catalan painters: Rafael Tomás and Joan Figuera.

The activity of these and other painters trained in Catalonia and active in Sardinia gave rise to a real island pictorial school: the Stampace school, hegemonic during the 16th century.

Many altarpieces already in the destroyed Cagliari church of San Francesco di Stampace are now in the National Art Gallery of Cagliari, second only to the Museu d'Art de Catalunya in terms of quantity and quality of the late Gothic Catalan polyptychs

that are kept there.

Update

20/9/2023 - 11:22