SERRA, JUNIPERO. – Franciscan Friar Minor, born Miguel, born at Petra (Majorca) on 24 November 1731, died at Monterey (California) on 28 August 1784.
On 14 September 1730 he took the Franciscan habit. He obtained a degree in theology at Palma, where for some time he taught philosophy and theology at the University of Majorca. On 1 January 1750 he arrived in Mexico City and at the College of S. Fer-
and St Francis in the Gallery of Modern Art, and the Coronari on the staircase of S. Carlo ai Catinari, now in Florence, in the local Gallery of Modern Art. Upon returning to Bologna, he frescoed (1886) on the vault of the provincial council chamber Irnerio glossing the ancient laws, his last work.
An extremely acute and incisive draughtsman, with an almost mathematical precision by which he achieved genuinely stereoscopic effects, S. constantly yearned for a colour that would be equally vivid and effective. But because he always conceived colour as an element in itself, detached from drawing, his paintings, although clear and lively in their hues—at times almost porcelain-like—lack chromatic vitality: a drawing almost always clearly defined by dark or violet lines restricts the fields of colour, stifling every vibration.