Veronica with the Holy Face of Mary (Reliquary ?)

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. This panel is a Veronica with the image of the face of the Virgin from Vic Cathedral that bears some resemblance to the well-known Veronica attributed to the self-same Jaume Cabrera kept in the treasury of Tortosa Cathedral. The devotion to the Veronicas, promoted particularly in this country by King Martin I the Humane to mark the occasion of the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, spread to Catalonia during the 15th century. With this aim Jaume Cabrera created a very characteristic prototype that was much imitated and of which several examples have been conserved.