6/18 – 6/19/14. Barcelona, Spain
It was nearly four yesterday by the time I found my hotel and set out to explore the city. In view of the limited time available, I decided to focus on the Bari Gotic (Gothic quarter), the heart of the Medieval (and Roman) town. I began with the city museum of Barcelona, which dispersed a modest collection of artifacts through a basement containing the remains of a Roman industrial quarter, a main floor built into the former royal residence, and a second story connected to a thirteenth-century chapel.
The city cathedral is one of the more impressive medieval churches in my experience, less on account of its size or age than for the balance of its interior space and richness of décor. Each of the several dozen side chapels houses a brightly-ornamented shrine and altar, the finest of which, Gothic in style, date to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This sort of art is always most impressive in its original context.
In the subsequent hour, walking around Gaudi’s massive (and still very unfinished) Sagrada Familia, I had ample opportunity to consider how setting contributes to an appreciation of art. Sagrada Familia is hemmed on its long sides by two busy streets and their adjoining buildings. Nowhere is it possible to get a good view of any one façade. But then I suppose medieval cathedrals were often equally integrated into the fabric of their cities.
Today, most of my time was spent getting to and from, and padding frantically around, the city of Tarragona. Located about a two-hour’s bus ride from Barcelona, Tarragona was Roman Tarraco, a provincial capital and one of the most important cities in Roman Spain. Although the modern city preserves no ruins as spectacular as those of Nimes or Arles, it boasts an excellent museum, a picturesque old quarter, and (best of all) a beautiful seaside location. I had no time for the beach, of course, but the sea breeze followed me wherever I went.
I began with the so-called “provincial forum” and its associated buildings, the ruins most directly relevant to my project. Although little survives above the ground – Napoleon’s soldiers dynamited the stadium, the forum itself was pulled apart for its stone in the Middle Ages, and a cathedral stands atop the former imperial temple – the city museum and a few battered remains succeed in evoking the scale and splendor of the vanished buildings. I was particularly impressed with the museum itself, where a surprising number of fine mosaics and sculptural fragments (some taken from a nearby villa associated with the provincial governors) are on display.
The amphitheater, Tarragona’s most spectacular standing ruin, is located just above the seashore. The building itself has suffered the usual depredations, its stones purloined and repurposed to build (successively) two churches, a monastery, a barracks, and a prison. Unsurprisingly, relatively little remains in situ. The main attraction of the surviving sections is their photogenic location beside the city beach; as sweat dripped onto my camera lens, I found myself envying the bathers in the surf a hundred yards away.
Fortunately, I spent the next two hours in a much cooler place. The cathedral of Tarragona was, as mentioned, built over the old imperial temple, at the city’s highest point. The exterior, shrouded by later construction, is relatively unimpressive. The interior, however, preserves a dazzling array of artistic and architectural treasures. Unlike its counterpart in Barcelona, moreover, it is virtually untouristed. With the aid of an excellent audioguide, I worked my way along the nave from chapel to chapel. As at Barcelona, these presented a variety of decorative styles. I particularly liked the Flamboyant (late) Gothic examples, which set a riot of decoration into ornately sculpted frames. The Baroque chapels exhibited a similar horror vacui, but compressed into more formal harmonies. The highlight was the magnificent Gothic high altar, decorated with scenes from the life of St. Thecla. Its forty feet of gold and alabaster, massively detailed but carefully balanced, dominated the entire church. The whole is a striking monument to the truly pan-European nature of International Gothic, since its making enlisted craftsmen and techniques from as far afield as northern France and the Low Countries.
The cathedral cloister had several impressive chapels of its own, and featured elaborately sculpted capitals. Its chief attraction for me, however, was the sea breeze which wafted gently through the columns, fanning palm fronds in the garden within. I have never had anything resembling a vocation for the contemplative life, but I can imagine spending my days – or at least a good hour – in a place like this. The museums adjoining the cloister showcased gothic paintings and sculpture taken from the cathedral and other regional churches. The artifacts were interesting and well-displayed, but I was most struck by the fact that the walls of this section of the cathedral were those of the Roman temple precinct – a neat demonstration of how Christianity appropriated the sites and symbols of its predecessor.
After a brief walk along the city walls – the lowest courses of which, cyclopean masonry from the third century BC, are old enough to have defied Hannibal – I forayed out into the modern city to see the remains of the civic forum, but was foiled by Spanish visiting hours (who closes a museum from 2-5?) in an attempt to visit the paleo-Christian necropolis.
My bus to Barcelona was late, and I was left with only an hour to do my laundry. The three machines adjacent to mine were claimed by (respectively) two college-age backpackers, an elderly woman with three pillows, and (just next to me) a glowering man with enormous arms. All five of us were in competition for the same two dryers, and I lost repeatedly. The bodybuilder’s clothes were finished first, but I had the sense not to touch his machine; the backpackers had mistakenly entered thirty extra minutes on their dryer, effectively removing it from contention; and the old lady kept re-entering her pillows. A machine finally opened fifteen minutes before closing, and I escaped with my clothes moments ahead of the owner.