SERRA, Catalan family of painters
The brothers Francesco, Jaume, and Pere were the sons of a tailor and natives of Barcelona. Their artistic leadership of the city forged the dominant style there in the second half of the 14th century. The style of the Serra workshop consisted of a mixture of elements inherited from the Destorrents family (especially from Rafael Destorrents, with whom Pedro Serra trained), and the ever-present influence on Catalan art of Italian painting, particularly of Sienese art. Despite the compositional and iconographic similarities that link the work of the Serra to Sienese painting, however, there is a definite streak of French Gothic influence, and their workshop production is also marked by the strong, individual stamp of the native Spanish tradition. The workshop was evidently a collaborative enterprise, since several hands can be distinguished in all the surviving works.
