LUIS DE DALMAU
The Louvre is fortunate in possessing an authentic and extremely important, though badly restored, altarpiece by Ludovico Luis de Dalmau, the first Spanish painter whose personality emerges definitely from the obscurity of the Gothic period in Spain. Dalmau was a Catalan who flourished about the middle of the fifteenth century, and who, although not a direct pupil of the Van Eycks, shows such close affinity with their style that certain modern critics are inclined to ascribe to him, with insufficient reason, certain pictures, like the Fountain of Living Water at the Prado, by the heads and founders of the Bruges school. In spite of the different types and the increased angularity of the drapery folds in Dalmau’s Enthronement of St. Isidore (No. 1703a), this Eyckian influence is clearly traceable in the Louvre picture, which shows the Virgin enthroned under a Gothic canopy wearing a crown of typically Spanish form, and handing the pallium to the saintly Bishop of Seville, who kneels on the left. Further back on the same side are four angels with the episcopal insignia. The group is balanced on the right by St. Anthony the Hermit in the foreground, and SS. Catherine, Margaret, Agatha, Odilia, and Apollonia grouped around the throne. The picture was originally in a church at Valladolid, and was bought for the Louvre at the Bourgeois sale at Cologne in 1904 for £3025.