Master of Vielha (Bartomeu García?). Catalonia or Aragon. Circa 1490-1500.

“Saint Quiteria” Panel painting in tempera.  Catalonia or Aragon. Circa 1490 - 1500. 97 x 57 cm. Provenance: France, private collection. Labels: on the back is the restorer Henry Leguay's label (1943). A second, anonymous label has the geographical and chronological identification of the panel. As Albert Velasco explains in his report on this panel, this is a previously unknown painting by the Master of Vielha, a late Gothic painter active in Catalonia and Aragon at the end of the 15th century. The table shows an enthroned depiction of Saint Quiteria, who appears accompanied by an angel. The saint holds the palm of martyrdom with her right hand, while the left rests on a book that rests on her knee, where we read the following inscription: “Santa Quiteria ora pro nobis [ilegible] // [S]ant [ilegible] ora pro nob[is] [ilegible],” which allows us to identify the saint. To her left is a full-bodied angel dressed as a deacon, whose wings, like the nimbus, are cut out against the golden background of the panel, which gives them great prominence, achieving a very dramatic result that is in keeping with the great tradition of golden backgrounds in relief that permeates Catalan and Aragonese 15th century painting. The painted surface is in a good state of preservation, although it should be noted that the support was cut by about twenty centimetres on the left side, which prevents us from seeing the left upright of the throne, for example. It was also slightly cropped at the bottom. As part of this restoration work, carried out by the workshop of Henry Leguay in January 1943 —as one of its two labels indicates—the original support was lowered and the painting was transferred to a canvas. The inscription on the aforementioned label indicates that the conservation-restoration intervention was carried out without problems, which is confirmed by observing that the polychromed surface does not present significant repainting and preserves the original style of the painter. As far as the iconography of the work is concerned, Velasco continues his report by stating that Saint Quiteria is a 5th-century saint whose devotion had a special boom in the Iberian Peninsula during medieval and modern times. Worship of the saint was introduced in Castile in the 12th century by Bernardo de Agén, bishop of Sigüenza, who named her the patron saint of his diocese. From there it spread to the Crown of Aragon, becoming important in Majorca and, above all, in the area of Aragon, especially in Zaragoza. She was regularly invoked against rabies, pestilence and any type of plague. In fact, although this does not appear in the panel studied here, one of her usual attributes is that of the rabid dog that she holds with a belt or chain, as we see in two works related to the painter Pere García de Benavarri, a panel from Zaragoza that appeared recently on sale in London and the predella of an altarpiece which has been divided between the Prado Museum and the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. In both works, the animal on the leash bites her hands furiously, as the aim was to associate it with the evil of rage and show, in turn, the havoc it caused. In the Kingdom of Aragon, one of the most interesting cycles dedicated to Saint Quiteria is the one we find in an altarpiece from the Hospital of San Antonio in Palma, attributed to Joan Loert and kept in the Museum of Majorca, which is striking for its early period - from the second quarter of the fourteenth century. As for the author of the work that concerns us, Dr. Velasco assures us that his style leaves no room for doubt when it comes to making this specific artistic attribution. This is a painter, the Master of Vielha, whose name we do not know, and hence his name is based on a specific work, the main altarpiece of Sant Miquèu de Vielha, in the Val de Aran (Catalonia).  The set is still kept in the church for which it was painted. There are numerous parallels that could be invoked to justify the attribution of the work to the Master of Vielha, since he is a painter with a very uniform and defined style, which was perennial throughout his career. Among his representations of enthroned saints, we can mention the "Saint Lucia" at the Godia Foundation in Barcelona, ​​also accompanied by various angels and with the same type of throne; the “Saint Peter in cathedra” from the altarpiece in Peralta de Alcofea (Huesca), which is very similar to our panel due to its type of composition and the distribution of the characters; also the main compartment of the "Reredos of the Virgin Mary", in the National Museum of San Carlos in Mexico City. Undoubtedly, we are faced with the same basic motif of an enthroned saint that the painter used with slight variations. In this case, the saint has not been shown with her most personal attributes, such as the rabid character, the bedevilled character or the dog —as we see in the famous panel of “Saint Dominic of Silos” in the Prado Museum, by Bartolomé Bermejo — but instead the painter opted for an archetypal image that only allows the saint to be identified, as we said, by the inscription that appears on the book, since the palm of martyrdom is a generic attribute. The Master of Vielha is a painter that historiography has considered, like Pere Espallargues (doc. 1490-1495), to be a disciple of Pere García de Benavarri due to the similarities in their style and because both worked in the same geographical area. In fact, Espallargues and Pere García share another important coincidence, they both lived in Benavarri, as did Bartomeu García, the painter whom Alberto Velasco has proposed as the identity of the Master of Vielha in different studies. The Doctor indicates that the documentation places both Pere García and Bartomeu García in 1484 in the town of Barbastro, where Pere was making the main altarpiece for the church of the monastery of Saint Francis. The fact that two painters with the same last name and from the same locality appeared in Barbastro at that precise moment allows us to assume that, as Velasco states, they must have worked together.The proximity between Pere and Bartomeu García, who could have been his son, led Velasco to propose that the latter should be identified as the Master of Vielha, since this anonymous master who is the author of numerous preserved artworks is very clearly indebted to Pere García, both compositionally and stylistically. These similarities suggest something more to us than simply the use of the same models, that is, that these similarities could only be so close if a personal relationship existed between the two painters, such as the one that Pere and Bartomeu must have had. For more information regarding the graphic and technical description of the work, depictions of Santa Quiteria and the biography and links of the author, please contact the auction house. We would like to thank Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez, Doctor of Art History, for cataloguing this piece. Attached is a report of by Dr. Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez. Provenance: France, private collection.