Virgin of the Councillors

Around 1431 the king of Aragon, Alfonso the Magnanimous, sent his court painter Lluís Dalmau north to Flanders to study the new oil painting coming out of Jan van Eyck's workshop. Dalmau brought it home with him. This altarpiece, finished in 1445 for the chapel of Barcelona's city hall, was among the first works in Catalonia painted in the Flemish oil technique, and it looks it. The singing angels and Saint Andrew are lifted almost directly from van Eyck's great Ghent Altarpiece, which Dalmau had seen. Kneeling at the Virgin's feet are the five city councillors who governed Barcelona that year, painted from life at the same size as the saints beside them. Their faces are ordinary and particular, the earliest group of real Barcelona officials to survive in paint.