The role of the Canary Islands as a crucial stopover for Atlantic explorations and the subsequent consolidation of the trade route between the Iberian Peninsula and the West Indies is widely known.

Attracted by this new trade route, from the 15th century onwards Flemish merchants settled in both lower Andalusia and the Canary Islands, leaving evidence of the artistic splendour of their cities of origin in the works they imported and sponsored.

The trajectory of these communities is linked to the sugar mills with which they transformed the economy of the islands, especially La Palma, where a large number of works, both paintings and sculptures, of notable artistic quality are concentrated. These works, brought mainly by the main Flemish families such as the Monteverde, Van de Walle and Van Dale families, are examples of the artistic renewal of the time: the faithful reproduction of nature, the revival of classical language, the sense of perspective, as well as the dissemination of the new spiritual and devotional sensitivity with new spiritual movements such as the ‘devotio moderna’. Thus the humanisation of the sacred figures took on a new meaning, showing them with a hitherto unusual sensitivity and intimacy.

Themes were developed such as Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child, a continuation of medieval intimacy but with a new expressive and formal language, as if it were an intimate family conversation; iconographies inherited from the Middle Ages but with a more modern vision such as Saint Sebastian, protector against the terrible epidemics and diseases that afflicted the population; or the development of the iconography of Our Lady of Sorrows or The Pietà, a significant devotion of those years in the new ‘devotio moderna’, impregnated with pathos, which urges the faithful to share this pain sentimentally, although they also become a sign of social identity and the roots of the patron of these works with his Flemish city of birth, such as Antwerp or Mechelen, among others.