Catalan Gothic

I am an intelligent young woman who has the potential to do great things. In fact, I have already achieved great things by my own standards. A BA in physics is not something to be laughed at outright. I am proud of myself and my accomplishments.

I have to have a statement of affirmation like for times like these.

Goodness, I'm in a cold sweat just thinking about it.

I'm going to try to explain Catalan Gothic to you, as opposed to the other kinds of Gothic architecture you'll see around the continent of Europe. (Note: most of my information comes from two wikipedia articles and a neat site called Sacred Destinations where I actually get a lot of my stuff from. I'll check it with a library when I get to back to Chapel Hill.)

And I have no experience with art or architecture history, which means I'm probably going to sound dumb. Sorry for sounding dumb. But here goes nothing!

Here, be momentarily distracted by a picture of a cathedral.

So most of the churches you're going to be visiting if you're visiting the famous ones around Europe are going to be from somewhere between the 6th (500s) and early 19th (1800s) centuries AD. This is, broadly the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque time periods in architecture (according to the timeline at about.com, but there's also a pretty clickable and interesting timeline at HistoryWorld). Personally, I've seen a lot more Gothic in Germany, Austria and France and a lot more Renaissance and Baroque in Italy, but they're certainly not limited to these regions. Of course, each church was built under its own circumstances and influences, and you'll have modern churches, like La Sagrada Familia, being built in styles of their own but paying tribute to the styles before them, but a lot of the time, you'll walk into a church and the guide will have one of those architectural styles as the main style of the building.

Gothic isn't actually the word they used when they talked about the buildings we call Gothic at the time they were being built. They were being built in the "French" style then, and you do have a lot of your canoncial examples of Gothic architecture in France. Pointed arches, flying buttresses, awesome stained glass and rose windows, heavy decoration on most of the surfaces and twin towers at the facade of the church (these actually came from processions during Holy Week- you'd mount one set of stairs to be symbolically crucified and you'd descend the other to symbolically go to the grave). They only started calling it Gothic in the Renaissance or later, and even then, they called it that as a bit of a diss, equating Gothic with barbarian vandals.

So you take that kind of style, with the big churches, etc (that I have since seen a lot more of, so it seems that I did this whole thing backwards, especially if you think that I saw a lot of Renaissance before this) and you tweak it a bit in Catalonia, which is a region in Spain, like Andalusia, etc. You're mostly going to see this in Barcelona. The churches built in this style were built on that borderline between the Gothic and Renaissance stages in architecture and in particular, Barcelona Cathedral and Santa Maria del Mar, the two that I saw, were built by the same king- King Jaume II. Of course, this was built in a time when this part of Spain had a lot of influence- just as the cathedral in Seville was built after the Reconquest, these projects were started after a growth in power; Santa Maria del Mar was built after a victory at sea in 1324.

The main differences you're going to see in these churches are a lack of flying butresses, which, if you haven't seen 'em yet, you're not going to miss them; less emphasis on stained glass, which I could see; more somber decorations, so much less of the "let's carve every surface with a saint!" impulse that you'll see on other exteriors; equal height naves- you're not going to see the height of the church change at any stage; and less noticeable or non-existent transepts, the cross bars of the church. The bell towers that go along with these churches, if there are any, are generally separate buildings.

OK, that's done. I can break out of the nervousness. Barcelona Cathedral is in the gothic section of Barcelona and has one of my top ten favorite gargoyles.

Imagine a Howard Dean yell coming from this unicorn.

It's dedicated to Santa Eulalia, who's also a patron saint of Barcelona. She was just a kid when she was martyred by the Romans in the fourth century, burned at the stake. Her crypt is right below the main altar.

Barcelona's cathedral has a stand-alone choir like Seville's, but it's also got a glass door, so you're not entire blocked by the structure if you're stuck in the back.

Do you see the door? I do. 

My favorite thing about this cathedral, though, that sets it apart from all the others is the cloister.

With geese.

No one's sure how they got there, but they might symbolize the saint's virginity or the former glory of Rome. I'm sure they're delighted about both of these options.

Now Santa Maria del Mar is a prime example of Catalan Gothic.

Pretty low-key stained glass windows.

Not overly-decorated.

This actually doesn't have anything to do with Catalan Gothic, but I thought it did and spent a while taking pictures of it. Though, it's a seal of some kind and Catalan Gothic is due to an increase in prominence for the Barcelona crown, so maybe?

 Pretty much everything I listed goes here; most noticeably, the lack of decorations. This is also due, in part, to the burning of the interior that happened during the Spanish Civil War. The walls are still blackened in places.

It was actually a charming little church. Not busy, and you could see your way around the church. Quiet. How many of the people here knew that they were looking at a prime example of a specific type of Gothic architecture? How many of them would have cared? This is something that's really struck me while I've been going around- most of the people who are here saw a pretty building and stopped in. The story the church has to tell stays hidden until you go looking for it, unless you're looking at the darkened patches on the walls. The signs on the wall describing the facets of the church go mostly unread when they're around at all.

It just seems like there's a lot of good stories that are just getting missed out on.

La Sagrada Familia

"Yeah, I was surprised you didn't have Spain on your list to start out with!"
"Yes, but you haven't seen Catalan Gothic!"
"You mean you were in Barcelona and you didn't make seeing La Sagrada Familia a priority?"

Inevitably, someone is going to ask me what I'm doing in Europe and we'll talk about different churches and if they know anything about anything about church architecture, they'll have a reaction like the ones I've heard and reproduced above. Most people were amazed that I hadn't done extensive study on La Sagrada Familia. I just shrugged my shoulders and said that it hadn't come up.

Then I went to visit it and wondered the same thing they did: How did I not know about this?

The answer, of course, is pretty simple. I thought I really had all of this under control and had focused myself on older ceremonial churches, as they'd be the places I'd be the least familiar with. We don't exactly have examples of centuries old cathedrals back home. At least none like this. But we also don't have La Sagrada Familia back home either.

Now, it's not finished yet, so don't get nervous about it or upset about the scaffolding. It's been in production since around 1884, or at least this stage has been, since it's the product of Antoni Gaudi's forty years of work. The designer died in 1926 and is buried in the church's crypt, having left the project before seeing it halted by the Spanish Civil War in 1935 and his designs and models burned for reminders of the old religion that had held Spain for so long.

But to me, this is anything but old. It's a church on the scale of a cathedral being built right before my eyes. These monumental projects always take a long time and to see the construction on the remaining ten towers (there's already eight up, but there will be eighteen- one for each of the apostles, one for each of the four gospel writers, one for Mary and one for Jesus, topped with a cross that'll reach just one meter short of the height of the nearby hill, because Gaudi believed that his work should not rival God's) and on the Glory facade, already seeing the Nativity facade around the back and the Passion facade by the entrance near finished. And that's just the outside.

Now, Gaudi packed tons of symbolism into the things he put in the designs, so much so that I don't really know what to tell you to look at first. Really, it's something that I can't and won't dive into. Ask me sometime and I'll do my best to point out things I know from the pictures I have and the things I've since read, but my recommendation is for you to go on your own and see this place. It's definitely worth what you pay to get in.

Oh, and the inside. I've started to see myself as a battle-hardened church viewer and this place even took me by surprise. I stepped over the outlines of the procession into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday

 and into the sanctuary and had to step out of the way to say, Oh wow softly as I stared up at the heights of the church.

The pillars were inspired by the kind of Gothic specific to this part of Spain, Catalan Gothic. I saw a couple of examples in Barcelona, particularly Santa Maria del Mar. But Gaudi also wanted to leave you feeling like you were in a forest and so the pillars throughout the nave are at differing heights.

The stained glass isn't all finished yet, letting in floods of white light all over the place. Even up behind the 1,000 person choir loft, the afternoon sun shone in.

 Especially from the skylight high over the altar, never to be covered with stained glass, pillars of light floated down into the sanctuary. It was just an amazingly pretty space.

And the best thing about it is that despite its grandeur, this is a place I could see myself worshipping. Not just coming to hear a mass in a language that I doubly wouldn't understand, as it would be in Catalan and not Spanish, the language that I can guess my way around. But here, I could imagine myself listening to the choir, watching the service progress. The layout of the church made sense and I felt at home even at the bottom of such a tall tower. I walked around with songs from my past times in choirs floating around my head due to the Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus encircling the bell towers on the way into the building.

I really just want to walk you through the space in a thousand pictures. It was only consecrated in 2010 by Pope Benedict and the inside isn't finished yet, but it's still amazing in every sense of the word. It also appreciates words. The main doors of the church, on the Glory facade, when it's finished, are coated with the words of the Pater Noster, Our Father, in Catalan and in languages from the world over.

 If a building could embody my ideals, honoring the environment we live in, the traditions we hold, the glorious God we serve and acknowledge the wonderful diversity of the global world we've all been thrown into, it would be this building.

Oh, and they have St. George. He's my favorite.

Also the patron saint of Catalonia. 

Clearly, the space's fate is sealed. I'm going to have to love it.