Jaume Serra
Crown of Aragon · International Gothic, Catalan Gothic, Sienese style
The story
The oldest royal portrait in the Prado shows a man who had no throne when it was painted. In a panel made around 1359 for the church of Santa María at Tobed, in Aragon, the Virgin holds the Child while four donors kneel at her feet wearing crowns. They are Enrique of Trastámara, his wife Juana Manuel and two of their children. At that date Enrique was a rebel at war with his half-brother Pedro I of Castile, and those crowns were a claim on a title he did not hold. He won the war ten years later and reigned as Enrique II.
The painter was Jaume Serra, one of four brothers who ran the busiest workshop in Barcelona in the second half of the 14th century. Their manner came out of Sienese painting from Tuscany by way of earlier Catalan masters, gold grounds, narrow slanted eyes, small mouths, and it spread from Barcelona across the Crown of Aragon. The brothers worked together on the great altarpiece for the nunnery of Sijena.
Neither the year Jaume was born nor the year he died is recorded. He is documented from 1358, and the Tobed panel reached the Prado in 2013, given with eleven other medieval and Renaissance works by the collector José Luis Várez Fisa.
