The 15th-century Spaniard Bartolomé Bermejo looked to Flemish art for inspiration, and he found it with style, writes Aidan Dunne.
His name is unlikely to be on the tip of your tongue, but Cordoba-born Bartolomé Bermejo is widely regarded as the foremost pre-16th- century Spanish artist. He was the main figure in a remarkably fruitful period in 15th-century Spanish painting, during which the influence of Flemish art was decisive in the formation of a distinctive realist style among the artists of the Hispanic kingdoms.
Hispano-Flemish Gothic Painting: Bartolomé Bermejo and his Time, an exhibition that has just enjoyed a two-month run at Barcelona's National Museum of Catalan Art and can be seen at Bilbao's Museum of Fine Arts from Monday, is by far the most ambitious attempt to explore the phenomenon.
To visit the show is a strange, even disorientating experience. There is no doubting a profound northern influence on the hard, crystalline realism of Bermejo and many of his contemporaries, but at times it is as if a whole representational language has been imported intact, complete with northern physical types and contexts.
That is not quite the case, it should be said. Other influences, from France to Italy, fed into the shaping of this particular development of International Gothic. And the Iberian painters put their own stamp of things. But the sense of dislocation is sometimes quite strong.
One of the difficulties of building an exhibition around the work of Bermejo is the fact that, although he was extremely productive, and was deeply engaged in projects that demanded formidable levels of logistics and documentation, facts about him are surprisingly scant.
The evidence that he was born in Cordoba, for example, comes from one reference, inscribed on the frame of his Pieta painted for Barcelona Cathedral. No corroboration has emerged. The Pieta, incidentally, is a terrific painting, unmistakably northern in feeling, but also Bermejo's own. It is one of the reasons Hispano-Flemish Gothic is worth serious consideration and not merely an art historical curiosity.
It was not uncommon at the time for wealthy patrons to dispatch their artists northwards to study at first hand the exciting new techniques of Flemish painting. By meticulously building up images in layer upon layer of oil colour glazes, Flemish painters were able to create startlingly realistic effects.
It is a hallmark of the Gothic, in many respects a fairly vague term, that these illusionistic feats are not integrated in a coherent scheme of spatial representation.
Hence Gothic paintings, with their obsessive, fetishistic attention to areas of visual detail, and their oddly disjointed spatial quality, can be disturbing to our eyes.
Artists will linger on a piece of patterned fabric, or a marble tile, with a fascinated intensity, to the point where parts of the image have an hallucinatory vividness.
All of which is true of Bermejo's work. So immediately adept was he with the techniques of oil painting that it is generally assumed that, while he lacked a suitably rich patron, he did spend time studying with Flemish painters but, again, there seems to be no documentary evidence that he did so.
What is certain about him is that he moved around a lot.
In fact he seems to have been temperamentally restless, to the extent that he would begin and abandon projects before they were completed, something that presumably didn't endear him to his various employers.
So the exhibition organisers have taken what might be regarded as a drawback about Bermejo and made of it a key to designing the show, linking the work of various practitioners of Hispano-Flemish Gothic by tracing Bermejo's working sojourns in Valencia, Aragon, Catalonia, Majorca and Castile.
Bermejo emerges from this survey with his reputation enhanced. To see many of his works gathered together allows us the opportunity of getting an overall picture of his artistic world and the practical constraints within which he operated.
There is no doubt that he was capable of making complex pictorial compositions with an impressively integrated spatial and aesthetic sense - moving away, in other words, from what might be termed the visual inconsistencies that are inherent to the Gothic.
Some of the highly detailed commentaries argue, fairly plausibly, that he should be hailed as a pictorial innovator in certain respects, though it's not quite a case of rewriting the history books.
He certainly stands out in the present company. Once we look beyond him, the exhibition is something of a mixed bag, always interesting but with works that you would probably walk by without a second glance in any European museum.
There are other artists of stature, however, and often the significance of their work is all the greater in the local context. Lluis Dalmau, for example, was an early exponent of oil painting technique. His Madonna of the Councillors, commissioned by the councillors of Barcelona, is a straightforward Gothic work. But it also marks the introduction of oil painting, the portrait and the landscape into Catalan art - a notable hat-trick.
Other striking figures include Juan de Flandes, a painter of real character and intelligence about whom little is known, apart from the fact that he was active in Castile, the Master of St Nicholas, Jaume Huguet, Martin Bernat, and the Italian Paola de San Leocadio, who worked in Valencia. All were artists of real personality whose work is distinguished by real ability and insight into character.
Hispano-Flemish Gothic Painting: Bartolomé Bermejo and his Time represents a major undertaking on the part of the National Museum of Catalan Art on Montjuic in Barcelona. It is part of a revitalisation of the museum, which is happening against the background of a major refurbishment and development programme of the huge National Palace building that houses it.
In forging links with other institutions in Spain and abroad, and in providing an insight into an important moment in Spanish art history, the project should help to put a resurgent museum firmly on the map.
Hispano-Flemish Gothic Painting: Bartolomé Bermejo and his Time is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Plaza del Museo, Bilbao, until August 31st. www.museobilbao.com