Altarpiece dedicated to Saint Anthony and Saint Margaret

Lluís Borrassà, the second son of the painter Guillem Borrassà, was part of a family of painters from Girona which worked in this country from the mid-14th century until the mid-15th century. There is documentary evidence that in 1383 Lluís Borrassà's painting workshop was open in the city of Barcelona, soon to become one of the largest workshops in the city, where numerous artists, helpers and collaborators worked. His arrival in Barcelona coincided with the moment when the Italianate Gothic style, prevalent in this country throughout the second half of the 14th century, whose chief disseminator had been the Serra brothers' workshop, was exhausted and going into decline. The new International Gothic art that in those years was beginning to be produced in Flanders, Paris or Milan was characterised by leaving behind the balance and the sober harmony of the shapes and the colours, made fashionable by the artists from Siena of the 'trecento', in order to introduce a new naturalistic aesthetic based on the dynamism and the movement of the figures and the use of very bright and contrasting coloured pigments. The Episcopal Museum conserves possibly the most representative collection of work by Lluís Borrassà, through which we can follow the introduction and development of this new artistic current in his work. The altarpiece of Saint Anthony the Abbot and Saint Margaret from Rubió, despite being a modestly sized altarpiece, introduces in the lateral scenes this new narrative language based on very explicit gestures like the scene of the saint's dialogue, refusing Olybrius' advances.