Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist with Donor

Joan Mates's Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist with Donor, painted around 1410 and now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, is a characteristic work of the Catalan International Gothic, showing the two Johns — patron saints of an unknown donor — flanking the small kneeling figure of the patron himself. Mates was active in Barcelona and represents the sophisticated blend of French, Italian, and local Catalan traditions that made early fifteenth-century Catalan painting one of the most distinctive schools in Europe. The inclusion of the donor in the lower register — smaller in scale than the saints but individualized — follows the convention of votive portraiture that was standard in Catalan altarpiece commissions.

Mates employs a gold ground with the elegant linear figure style of the Catalan Gothic, each saint draped in distinctively colored robes with delicately tooled haloes. The donor figure below is treated with a contrasting naturalism that anticipates the portrait conventions of later decades. Color is clear and cool in the Catalan manner.