Panel from Saint John Retable

Domingo Ram was an Aragonese painter active in the second half of the fifteenth century, one of the leading masters of the Hispano-Flemish style in the Crown of Aragon. The Panel from Saint John Retable, now in the Metropolitan Museum, was originally part of a large altarpiece dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, the classic narrative program that structured the biography of the Forerunner from his miraculous birth to his martyrdom. Retables — elaborately painted and carved altar structures — were the dominant form of religious art in Iberian churches, and the production of major retable programs required months or years of collaborative workshop activity. Ram's panel shows the Flemish influences that dominated Aragonese painting through close commercial and dynastic ties with the Burgundian Netherlands, translated into the scale and formality of Spanish ecclesiastical patronage.

Ram employs the Hispano-Flemish technique — meticulous oil painting of drapery and facial detail — within the large-scale compositional format demanded by altarpiece production. Figures are arranged with the formal clarity necessary for legibility at distance in a church interior, and gold leaf is used selectively in the architectural frame and halo details.