Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)

Museum · Palau Nacional, Montjuïc (Sants-Montjuïc)Barcelona,Spain

Catalonia's national art museum, where Pyrenean church apses are rebuilt full size indoors with paintings peeled off village walls and laid back on.

The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya collected walls. Between 1919 and 1923 teams were sent into the Pyrenean valleys to strip paintings off the insides of village churches. The method is called strappo: cloth is glued to the surface and pulled, and the colour layer lifts away while the plaster stays behind. The apses were then rebuilt at full size inside the museum and the paint laid back onto the same curve. So you stand beneath the Christ of Sant Climent de Taüll, painted in 1123, at the height and in the shape it was made for. An Italian restorer, Franco Steffanoni, was brought in to teach the technique to the Junta de Museus, the public body then assembling Barcelona's collections. The removals are still argued over, because the valleys lost paintings that had been in their churches for eight hundred years. The museum fills the Palau Nacional, put up on the flank of Montjuïc for the exposition of 1929, which is why it is far grander than a collection needs. Beyond the Romanesque rooms it runs on through Gothic altarpieces, baroque painting and rooms of modern Catalan art.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Do the Romanesque rooms first — they are at the start of the route and they are the reason to come, and people who work through the whole building in order reach them with nothing left.
Look for the almond shape — the figure of Christ sits inside a pointed oval in nearly every apse here, and once you can see that frame the crowded rest of the painting organises itself around it.
The hill is done by escalator — outdoor escalators climb from the avenue below to the terrace, so the long ceremonial staircase in front of the palace is optional rather than obligatory.
The free afternoons fill the apses — Saturday from mid-afternoon and the first Sunday of the month cost nothing, and the Romanesque rooms are narrow enough that a group blocks a whole apse.

Things to do

1
Step inside a rebuilt apse and find the seam
Walk into one of the reinstalled apses rather than looking at it from the doorway, and stop under the centre. The curve closes around you and the figure is above and slightly ahead, exactly where a twelfth-century congregation would have found it. Then get close to the edge. The plaster carrying the painting is not the original wall, and a fine seam marks where the modern shell meets the old surface.
2
Compare two Christs in the same room
The apses from different valleys hang within a few steps of each other. Pick two and look only at the faces and the hands. One painter drew hard black outlines and staring eyes, the next used softer modelling. These were separate workshops moving through the mountains, and the difference is visible in a minute.
3
Use the terrace on the way out
The doors at the front open onto the palace terrace above the fountain and the avenue. From here the whole axis runs straight down the hill and out across the city. Most people come out of the museum and turn straight down the steps without stopping.