MNAC: The Palau Nacional and the Rescued Murals
Why is it significant?
Turn your back to the palace for a moment, right here at the top of the steps, and look down. The fountain, the avenue, the Venetian towers, the round bullring, and beyond them the whole of Barcelona stretching towards Tibidabo... this terrace was designed to make you feel exactly like this.
Key Facts
| Place | MNAC: The Palau Nacional and the Rescued Murals |
|---|---|
| Address | Palau Nacional, Parc de Montjuïc s/n, 08038 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.36860, 2.15350 |
| Part of Walk | Montjuïc, the Hill of Big Dreams: Barcelona's 1929 Expo, Olympic Ring & Castle |
| Generated | Generated |
Turn your back to the palace for a moment, right here at the top of the steps, and look down. The fountain, the avenue, the Venetian towers, the round bullring, and beyond them the whole of Barcelona stretching towards Tibidabo... this terrace was designed to make you feel exactly like this.
The Palau Nacional was built as the central hall of the 1929 Exposition, a showpiece with a big dome and corner towers. It was never supposed to be a museum, but after the fair it became the home of the art of Catalonia, and today it is the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, the MNAC.
The treasure inside has a dramatic story. In the early twentieth century, dealers and foreign collectors discovered the medieval churches of the Pyrenees, with their walls covered in Romanesque paintings. In 1919 the apse paintings of one small church, Santa Maria de Mur, were sold, removed and shipped abroad. They ended up in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where they still are.
Catalonia panicked, and then acted. Between 1919 and the early 1920s, Italian specialists were hired to peel the frescoes off the walls of remote mountain churches using a technique called strappo: glue cloth to the painting, let it dry, and pull away a skin of pigment. Carried down the valleys on mules and carts, the paintings were remounted here on apses rebuilt to the original shapes. The star is the Christ in Majesty from Sant Climent de Taüll, a church consecrated in 1123, with huge eyes staring straight through you.
It is a strange feeling, standing in a city museum inside the reconstructed curve of a village church, nine hundred years after someone painted it by candlelight. Were the paintings saved or taken? Both, people still say. Now walk up the hill along the Avinguda de l'Estadi, towards a stadium with a classical façade... and a story about an Olympics that never happened.