ABSTRACT
Lorenzo Mercadante de Bretaña and his pupil Pedro Millán belong to the most important medieval artists that worked in Andalusia in the second half of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century. Their elaborated style and exceptional quality had a remarkable influence on the artistic production in southern Spain of that time. Lorenzo Mercadante could have been born in Italy (Moreno Mendoza et al. 1991), but he learned the arts in France, in Brittany, as reveals his name (de Bretaña). From there he came to Seville, where he is documented between 1454 and 1467, working on several orders for the town cathedral. Among the most important are the porticos of Nativity and Baptism. His style reveals a mixture of French court forms and Nordic spiritualism, as well as a realistic and meticulous modelling, inspired by the Flemish painting. Pedro Millán was his pupil and in the sixties his collaborator on the cathedral’s porticos. Millán carried on the master’s style, which he enriched with the traditional andalusian expression. He is documented between 1485 and 1507 and probably died before 1526.
