Compartment from an altarpiece with the Virgin and the Child and angel musicians

Jaume Cabrera was a Barcelona painter trained almost certainly in the workshop of the brothers Serra, who must have transmitted to him the taste for the Italianate style characterised, in his case, by the creation of harmonious, very balanced compositions and a very placid narrative feel that remained unchanged throughout his life. The use of this Italianate Gothic style contrasts with the new stylistic current of early International Gothic that in the same years was already being used by Lluís Borrassà and Joan Mates, so we should consider Jaume Cabrera to be a painter of conservative tastes, possibly the last representative of that lost 14th-century world of art. The focus of the painting is the Child Jesus, sitting in the lap of the Virgin – portrayed according to the typology of the Virgin of Humility, seated on a cushion on the ground – who is playing with a flying goldfinch, attached to his hand by a ribbon. Next to him, some angels are playing musical instruments, creating one of the most lyrical and poetic settings in Catalan Gothic painting.