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St John, by Pere Terrencs, Palma’s most successful painter between 1500-1520.

St James, or Santiago, in the panel by artist Francesc Comes, active between 1392 and 1415.

The altarpiece of St Paul, dating from the 1360s, was designed for the bishop’s chapel.

A pulpit at the Diocesan Museum

A view of the Diocesan Museum’s exhibition space

The Bridge of Purgatory is attributed to Mateu Lopez and his son of the same name.

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Packed with saints and sinners, Palma’s superb Diocesan Museum is devoted to
1,500 years of sacred art: from Byzantine to Baroque and Gothic to Gaudí.

The shrieking beast’s tongue rolls out like a red carpet to greet the knight’s lance. Then in goes the weapon, sliding past cruel teeth and out through the throat’s taut flesh in a dramatic blowout of blood. St George has slain the dragon. It’s a victory of good over evil, witnessed not just by the praying princess but her kin and townsfolk, gathered on the balconies of Palma’s Almudaina Palace.

For this is undoubtedly Palma, with it’s wide ship-filled bay stretching from the windmills of Portixol past the stout city walls, along today’s Paseo Marítimo and as far as Porto Pí.

There’s another witness too: if you look closely you’ll see yourself–albeit in 15th-century costume–dimly reflected in the polished armour protecting the saint’s shin. But the remarkable altarpiece of St George at Palma’s wonderful and wonder-filled Diocesan Museum shows more than George’s defeat of the dragon, of good vanquishing evil. Look closely at the open gates of the city and you’ll see the Christian forces of King Jaume the Conqueror pouring through to do battle with the city’s erstwhile Muslim masters, here equated with the forces of darkness.

Religious and patriotic, the St George altarpiece is a tale of triumph on at least two levels. Yet, it’s an artistic triumph too: this work by Pere Nissart, with its use of oils, its stab at realism and attention to minute details taken from the real world, is also a triumph of Hispano-Flemish painting over art styles previously popular on the island of Mallorca and throughout the other Christian kingdoms of Spain.

You can trace the evolution of religious painting, from early Christian and Byzantine, through the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque and up to Gaudí, at Palma’s Diocesan Museum, a stunning space within the bishop’s palace, perched on the city walls.

But there’s more than art history on display here, more than a survey of piety and devotion. Wandering through the vaulted rooms is a journey through the medieval mind.

Saints are stoned and decapitated while souls are plunged into burning sulphur and swallowed by devils. As French thinker and critic Henri Focillon reminds us in his beautiful meditation on Gothic art: “The faith of the people was not that of the dignitaries and pontiffs. It required stronger, and perhaps, cruder nourishment… sentimental anecdotes, drama and miracles. It delighted in the recital of the lives of the martyrs; it desired to know the most efficacious saints and the relics which would cure diseases.”

There’s a clear bias towards the Gothic here. But this is chiefly because Renaissance and Baroque art is still in place in the churches and convents scattered throughout the island, having replaced the art that is now held here.

Christianity came early to this corner of the Roman Empire and the island subsequently moved into the Byzantine orbit. A sixth-century censer is testament to this period, as is a fragment of a capital from a sixth-century basilica. Christian dominance was, of course, interrupted by Muslim conquest in 902. So skip three hundred years but scarcely four steps and you’ll see examples of 13th-century Christian art such as a crucified Christ brought to the island by the knights of the Holy Sepulchre, who helped wrest the island from the Muslims in 1229.

The first Gothic art arrived on the island within a generation of the reconquest and is called Franco-Gothic–due to its Frankish influences–or linear Gothic thanks to the thick black lines that outline the figures’ profiles. Technically, paintings from the 13th century still have much in common with the Romanesque: vivid, opaque colours are flat and arranged in monochromatic areas–almost like stained glass–and are applied in egg tempera in hard, uniform layers.

Faces are often expressionless clones (see, for instance, the 11,000 virgins accompanying St Ursula at the nearby church of San Francisco) but there’s often lively and enjoyable detail in the background–scenes from everyday life, animals, floral and geometric themes.

This style was soon to lose out to the latest Italian fashion, however. Mallorca was fast becoming an important centre of trade in all manner of goods and slaves, an obligatory port of call for Italian merchant ships plying the sea lanes between Pisa and Genoa and Barcelona, Valencia, Moorish Spain and North Africa. By the late 13th century, Italian Gothic was arriving on the island–see the Diocesan Museum’s stunning Passion, which recalls Duccio's masterpiece, the Maestà, painted for Siena’s cathedral. Some scholars, such as the American, Chandler Rathfon Post, have ventured that it was through Mallorca that the Italo-Gothic style reached the rest of Spain. Meanwhile, Sienese art was also coming across the border from France, where the Pope had settled in Avignon in 1309. Soon, though, Spanish painters were making the style their own, imitating the Italian masters’ efforts to achieve a greater degree of perspective and a greater naturalism.

A good example of this style is the altarpiece of St Paul, conserved exactly where it was designed for, in the chapel of the bishop’s palace. It was commissioned by the bishop Antoni de Galiana, some time between 1363 and 1375, and features St Paul in the central panel holding a sword and book, with a portrait of the bishop himself, as donor, kneeling by his side. In the side panels are scenes from the saint’s life–the stoning of St Stephen, the conversion on the road to Damascus, the saint preaching, and his execution. There’s an effort to capture movement in these scenes, and there’s detailed architecture in the background, absent form earlier paintings. Like most paintings from the period it is anonymous but according to Tina Sabater of the University of the Illes Balears, the panel was painted by Pere Marçol and shows a breach with the style which had previously reached the island from Catalunya.

As the fourteenth century drew to a close, a new stylistic movement, defined as the International Style, was developing throughout Europe. With the the papal court of Avignon commissioning works from the best French and Italian artists, it was perhaps inevitable that different styles would begin to borrow from each other. The distinguishing feature of this new manner is the soft pictorial quality conveyed, primarily, by the decorative rhythm of folded draperies. The most significant Mallorcan painter from from this period is Francesc Comes, active between 1392 and 1415, and whose St James–or Santiagao de Compostela–can be seen here at the museum. Compare his robes, for instance, to those of St Paul. There was also a growing naturalism and the human figure, architecture, furniture, and landscape became increasingly realistic. Anecdotal details and humorous elements were also included.

Around 1427, Jan van Eyck, Flemish painter and gentleman-in-waiting to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, came to Valencia on a diplomatic mission, possibly with the aim of arranging the Duke’s marriage to the niece of King Alfonso V of Aragon. Though the marriage arrangements didn’t work out (the painter-diplomat had more luck finding a princess for his master in Lisbon the following year), the king was quite taken by van Eyck’s art. Flemish tapestries were already popular at court and the king’s grandfather, Joan I, had brought Flemish weavers to Aragon in 1400. Likewise, the rulers of Aragon had employed Flemish sculptors throughout the 14th century.

Now Alfonso V was to popularise Flemish painting. From Valencia, the king sent in 1431 one of his household painters, Luis Dalmau to Bruges, where van Eyck had just bought a house. After his return, Dalmau settled in Barcelona and there, in 1445, painted for the city councillors his one known work, a decent attempt by a talented craftsman at painting a van Eyck altarpiece.

So, van Eyck had turned out to be quite a matchmaker after all–and the marriage between the Spanish brand of International Gothic and Flemish painting was to produce a robust heir: Hispano-Flemish Gothic. This style favours oil over tempera, shows a remarkable tendency towards naturalism and, though the trend was resisted in Catalunya, substitutes gold backgrounds for landscapes.

In Mallorca, Pere Nissart’s 1468 masterpiece St George is the perfect example. Some see a clear van Eyck influence. Indeed King Alfonso had bought a St George by van Eyck, now lost, in 1444 in Valencia which he then had shipped to his court at his newly conquered Naples. We know little of the enigmatic Nissart, but this thesis means he would have to have been at some point in Valencia or Naples, not an unlikely event for an itinerant artist. Nissart is thought to have hailed originally from Nice–hence his name–and under guild rules was obliged to work alongside an important Mallorcan painter, Rafel Moger.

Moving along, we meet perhaps the most significant painter of the late 15th century: Pere Terrencs. He’d gone to study painting in Valencia, which in the 1480s was the greatest city in the kingdom, before returning to Mallorca in 1483. Painting his saints with great sensitivity, he allows a spark of their personality to shine through–see his Saints John, Augustine and Gregory–and he can handle more complex group compositions, such as the apparition of Christ, accompanied by the prophets in limbo, before his mother, the Virgin. He excels in detail too, casting his figures against lively backdrops of mountains, rivers and trees.

Throughout the first three decades of the 16th century, Terrencs remained enormously popular in Mallorca. But, tellingly, while the Dominican friars of Palma contracted him to work on their main altarpiece, they decided they wanted something quite different for their new Rosario chapel: they wanted a Renaissance altarpiece. Some time around 1520, the Middle Ages had finally come to an end.

Though Mallorcans clung to their beloved Gothic throughout the 16th century–the museum’s St Clare is clearly inspired by Nissart’s St George right down to the city of Palma in the background–Renaissance art inevitably gained ground.

Even as Terrencs was painting his wonderful late Gothic masterpieces, Spanish painters were travelling to Italy, much of it under Spanish control, from where they returned steeped in the new ideas of the Renaissance. Fernando Espagnolo assisted Leonardo da Vinci when he painted in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence from 1503 to 1505. In 1507, he’s back in Spain painting Biblical scenes on the wings of the main altarpiece of the Cathedral of Valencia, where the artist Juan Vicent Macip was also to work. He passed his love of detail and warm, luminous colour on to his son, Juan de Juanes (or Joan de Joanes) who became one of the most popular Spanish painters of his day. The Diocesan Museum houses a number of works by Juan de Juanes, including a St Jerome and a St Leonard.

But the artistic scene during the second half of the 16th century was dominated by the workshop of Mateu Lopez and his son of the same name. Mateu senior had learned his craft in the workshop of Macip and Juan de Juanes in Valencia before coming over to Mallorca, some say, to supervise the installation of an altarpiece painted by his masters for the cathedral. The Dormition of the Virgin, surrounded by Apostles is attributed to the Lopez workshop, as is another popular theme, the bridge of purgatory, over which souls, burdened by their sins, must run. Purgatory was a popular theme throughout the Catalan-speaking world: many would have read the 1397 Journey to Purgatory by the Catalan knight Ramón de Perellós, who had travelled to wild and mysterious Ireland to enter the other world on an island in Lough Derg.

In the first decades of the early 17th century, Mallorca’s most renowned painter was Miquel Bestard, who painted not merely religious themes but also for private homes. Indeed, the religious themes he dealt with often seem no more than an excuse to paint fantastic landscapes and improbable cities. Bestard painted at a time of growing regional awareness in Mallorca: the first volumes of the Historia de Mallorca had appeared in 1595. The city hall, meanwhile, had commissioned a series of portraits of the kings of the formerly independent kingdom of Mallorca, and saintly locals were finally being canonised. So it’s no surprise that Mallorcan mystic Ramón Llull was a popular theme with Bestard.

There’s lots more to see at the museum; there’s an interesting collection of 16th to 18th-century Mallorcan ceramic, and there are stained-glass windows and furniture designed by Gaudí for the cathedral in 1902.

As you leave you’ll even come face to face with a real dragon, a fearsome, embalmed crocodile. It’s not quite the beast of St George lore and it comes with a silly old yarn. But it sits well, all the same, in a museum where so much is inspired by myth and story, hopes and fears.