Compartments from the back of predella with Melchisedech and Moses

According to the documentary sources it seems that the young Jaume Huguet started out as a painter by the side of his uncle Pere Huguet who worked professionally in the Tarragona workshop of Mateu Ortoneda. In 1448 he set up his home in Barcelona, where he came into contact with the realistic 'ars nova' of Flemish influence, especially of the pictorial school of Jan van Eyck, made fashionable a few years earlier by the painter Lluís Dalmau with the altarpiece of the Virgin of the Councillors in the chapel of the Casa de la Ciutat in Barcelona, now in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. The two panels with Melchisedech and Moses are two of the panels on the back of the predella of the high altarpiece from the monastery church of Santa Maria in Ripoll, commissioned to our painter on February 26th 1455 by the abbot of the monastery Bertran de Samasó. According to the document of the contract Huguet undertook to paint three sides of a tabernacle, four compartments that flanked it and five compartments with grisaille on the back of the predella with the image of Christ with the Eucharistic chalice and four prophets. The only two panels to have survived from this group are these two with the prophets Melchisedech, dressed in a sacred tunic of Jewish tradition with the chalice in his hand, and Moses, with the mark of the two rays of the revelation on his head and the tablets of the law in his hands.