This collection of essays edited by Maria Rosa Terès analyzes the origins of the artistic relationships between Catalonia and Northern Europe, particularly in France, the Low Countries, and Germany. The date 1400 is a key reference in this study, as it aims to include a tradition of studies that have explored the diffusion of the International Gothic style. Examples of this can be seen in the catalogues of exhibitions such as Europäische Kunst um 1400 (Wien, 1962), Paris 1400: Les arts sous Charles VI (Paris, 2004), and Catalunya 1400: El Gòtic Internacional (Barcelona, 2012), which explore courtly art through the prism of supraregional relationships between the great dynasties. Most of the participating authors in this publication consider the year 1400 as a milestone, based on their analysis of documents and pieces of the fourteenth century, coinciding with the epoch of the kings of the Crown of Aragon, Peter IV the Ceremonious (1336–87), John I the Hunter (1387–96), and the first years of the rule of Martin the Humane (1396–1410).

The collection presents the work of a group of researchers from the University of Barcelona (IRCUM, Institut de Recerca de Cultures Medievals de la Universitat de Barcelona). Each author analyzes a different genre of artistic production, focusing on foreign contributions. Cultural exchanges (including the circulation and movement of artists and their works, and those of committees and models) are the central axes of each essay, even in instances where transmission is not a reciprocal process but merely a one-way process of reception, articulated in different phases and times of progressive assimilation or as a synthesis of different foreign models (such is the case of the examples of Italian and French paintings). The essential reference for these cultural transfers is the French court of Charles VI and his uncles John of Berry and Philip the Bold, so the study begins with the most representative and luxurious genres of courtly art: embroidery (Montserrat Aymerich), goldsmithing (Joan Domenge), illuminated manuscripts (Rafael Cornudella), and tapestries (Jacobo Vidal Franquet). Likewise, the role of the court as patron and active emulator of French fashion is highlighted in these texts, since in this period dynastic relationships with France were preferential, especially during the reign of Joan I and his two wives. Most of the artists who favored the spread of International Gothic in Catalonia came from France: for example, the embroiderer Jaume Copí, who became valet de chambre to the queen Violant of Bar, or the tapestry weaver (mestre de draps de figures) Joan lo Ros of Paris, member of “the house of the Senyora Reyna,” Eleanor of Sicily. Furthermore, this research also examines Catalonia’s appreciation of French illuminated manuscripts, and it reassembles the group as reflected in the group of French and German silversmiths who created pieces for the court. After the first essays, which deal with the context of the court, subsequent essays proceed to analyze architecture (Reinard des Fonoll and Antoni Conejo), wooden sculpture (Pere Sanglada, Maria Rosa Terès), and architectural reliefs (Montserrat Jardí).

Given the rich variety of art disciplines contemplated in this book, the absence of panel paintings is striking, especially if we consider its great importance in Catalonian Gothic art. The researchers oftentimes had to work in a complex framework with a scarcity of surviving pieces; this did not discourage them in their research, however, but encouraged them to find and establish new hypotheses and to reconsider documents published in the twentieth century. These new hypotheses and reconsiderations should be highly useful to historians. By drawing attention to specific decades of transition, these essays show art historians fundamental aspects of cultural practices in the early modern period, revealing information necessary in understanding the reception of French and Netherlandish art in the territories of the Crown of Aragon over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.