Madonna and Child

This panel was painted in 1359 for a man who did not yet have a throne. Henry of Trastamara, the illegitimate half-brother of King Pedro of Castile, was living in exile in neighbouring Aragon and waging a long war for the crown, which he finally secured in 1369 as Henry II. Along the lower edge kneel the tiny figures of that would-be king with his wife Juana Manuel and two of their children, dwarfed by the Virgin who nurses the Child above them. It was made as the centre of an altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria in the Aragonese village of Tobed. Jaume Serra and his brother Pere ran a busy Barcelona workshop that had taken in the gold grounds and gentle Sienese faces of Italian painting and carried them across the Pyrenees. For centuries the altarpiece stayed broken up, its side panels reaching the Prado in 1965 while this central one remained in private hands. The museum only reunited them in 2013, when the Varez Fisa family gave the middle panel to complete the whole.