Pere Serra

In 1357 a Barcelona tailor's son went into the workshop of Ramon Destorrents, painter to the king of Aragon, as an apprentice. That was Pere Serra, and he stayed four years.

Catalan painting at the time was taking its manner from Italy, above all from Siena, whose gold grounds and soft rounded faces travelled north along the trade routes into the Crown of Aragon. The Serra family turned that manner into a business. Pere and his brothers Jaume, Francesc and Joan ran a shop in Barcelona that supplied altarpieces to churches across Catalonia and Aragon. Around 1362 Francesc died, in one of the plague years that kept returning after the Black Death, and Pere moved into the workshop his brother Jaume was heading.

He outlasted all of them, working until about 1406, and some 50 panels are given to him and his shop. The altarpiece of the Holy Spirit he painted around 1394 for the main church of Manresa, a town inland from Barcelona, is usually called his finest. Two of his panels ended up a long way from Catalonia, in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan: a Virgin among musician angels, and a small Annunciation dated 1404, two years before the last document that names him.