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.
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 |
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