Bartolomé Bermejo

For centuries almost nothing was known about the man who painted some of the most dazzling panels in fifteenth-century Spain. Bartolomé Bermejo left so few traces that he was rediscovered only around 1905, when scholars linked the signature on a Pietà in Barcelona Cathedral to a scatter of earlier works across eastern Spain.

He seems to have come from Córdoba, in the south, but he worked as a wanderer, taking commissions in Valencia, Aragon and Catalonia. Somewhere along the way he learned the Flemish technique of painting in oil, still rare in Spain, which let him build up jewel-like glazes and mirror-bright armour.

You can see it in his Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil, painted in 1468 for a church near Valencia and now in the National Gallery in London. The archangel's breastplate reflects a whole city, and the donor who paid for the panel, a local lord named Antoni Joan, kneels in the corner in his real clothes. His late Desplà Pietà of 1490, named for the Barcelona archdeacon who commissioned it, sets the dead Christ against a strange, storm-lit landscape.

Fewer than twenty paintings by him survive, scattered between Spain, London and the United States.