Montjuic and The Art Museum of Catalunya

Beautiful sunny day in November, on a Mediterranean mountain, Montjuic, that overlooks Barcelona. Once the Jewish cemetery, now a weekend escape from the city.

We climbed Montjuic in dappled light, up the grand staircase to the art museum of Catalunya---A Thousand Years of Catalunyan Art--- which surpassed expectations. Meanwhile a manga convention was taking place and Barcelonans in manga costumes streamed, with their axes and wings, up the hill across from the Spanish Baroque cupolas and multiple levels in tawny majesty.

Inside the museum, Romanesque church interiors had been leached from their thousand year old walls, and replastered into concavities in the museum. Looming primitive eyes in stoic peasant faces of saints, bestiaries of the same creatures we have seen at the Babylonian Ishtar temple, men in trance playing instruments and dancing, wide eyed, while a hand casts a heavenly ray on them.

School children were herded in and sat at the feet of these visions, and then sang to a dancing marionette playing a violin. It was a folk song, slightly Middle Eastern, that they knew well. As they noisily traipsed thru the Romanesque apses, we threaded our way around them, progressing through Byzantine influences--always the wide eyes upon us--to Visigoth fragments, some from the French side of the Pyrenees. We traversed the slow progress toward Western faces, from the large headed peoples on the capitals of the Barcelona hospital, to a 3/4 gaze as we made our way toward the gothic.

Peter with his key

The gothic art section was stylized in a slender aesthetic, altarpieces that seemed to painted on leather, painted with white saints. Marble statues of increasingly delicate Madonnas, retables mostly of martyrdom--slender little saints calmly being boiled, or skinned, or roasted--the wide-eyed faces increasingly expressive, introspective or remote, more and more anguished at the Passion, giving way to severe bearded patriarchs. Peter with his key, Anthony with his child, God becoming a baby with an increasingly gentle mother Mary.

Strong Catalan painting

International influences crept in--in fact, 12th c Madonnas look very Chinese, carved in wood with little caps, their robes folded rhythmically about them, their faces in serene meditation. Gothic retables, so difficult to find in situ, abound. The brilliant scarlet and gold of the Spanish church with delicate but severe Fathers. As the Renaissance approached, these faces acquire more creases, more character, more secular realities.

The Baroque brought a stark, brutal realism, the white wrinkled skin of the saint (being peeled off) contrasted with fierce suffering eyes. The great El Greco's John the Baptist, luminous skin stretched across a face with eyes frosted in ecstasy. Landscapes of Toledo seen from afar, a gleaming cradled city a little like today's Barcelona seen from Montjuic.

International gothic

El Greco

St. Bartholeme, de Ribera

Scenes of Barcelona then give way to a modernism like the Parisian avant-garde of the late 19th c. Workers sit exhausted in abandoned gardens, Spanish Renoirs and Pissaros. The great Maria Fortuny and his influences, paintings of Arabian deserts and a Sultana reclining, black slaves and odalisques. With modernism comes a little Picasso. Art deco furniture by Gaudi, luxurious whimsy, and across the hall the photojournalism of the Spanish Civil War, details of life in a concentration camp not far from Leran. Sculptures a la Maillol.

Further up Montjuic we wandered past the Olympic Stadium, in the footsteps of the greats with Michael Jordan's amazingly small foot from the 1992 Barcelona games. A series of rocks surrounded a gray frieze of the Korean who had won the marathon. Below, Gaudi's Cathedral, Sagrada Familia, loomed its tentacles over the otherwise industrial city that sprawled over the valley, surrounded by Mediterranean hills. We wandered past a Botanical Garden and chatted with some Dutchmen. Their syndicate collects a few euros each year from its members and then sends them all on a 4-day holiday. Now they were pedaling around Barcelona.

View of the port from Montjuic castle

Up the hill, it turned out, was a cafe where we had Schweppes Limone in the hot sun and cool wind next to a sprawling French family, then climbed higher. Above was the Castle, a fortification in use over the centuries, as a defense for and offense against Barcelona below, where Lluis Campanys, president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, was executed by Franco. It has been a battleground, a museum, and now an esplanade over the sea with cafe's at different levels. We took the little funicular down as it slid round a corner, leaving Montjuic's serenity for the teeming city.