Basílica de la Mercè: The City's Patron and the Painter's Father
Why is it significant?
Come into the little square and look up at the curved baroque front of the basilica, and higher still, at the statue of the Virgin standing on top of the dome, looking out over the port. Sailors coming into Barcelona have seen her before almost anything else.
Key Facts
| Place | Basílica de la Mercè: The City's Patron and the Painter's Father |
|---|---|
| Address | Plaça de la Mercè 1, 08002 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.37960, 2.17970 |
| Part of Walk | Young Picasso's Barcelona: Els Quatre Gats, La Llotja & the Merchant Streets of La Ribera |
| Generated | Generated |
Come into the little square and look up at the curved baroque front of the basilica, and higher still, at the statue of the Virgin standing on top of the dome, looking out over the port. Sailors coming into Barcelona have seen her before almost anything else.
This is the Mare de Déu de la Mercè, Our Lady of Mercy, patron of Barcelona. Legend says that in 1218 she appeared to Pere Nolasc and asked him to found an order to ransom Christians held captive across the Mediterranean, and the Mercedarian friars built their house here. The present church went up between 1765 and 1775. Another story says that in the seventeenth century, when a plague of locusts devoured the fields, the city prayed to her, the insects vanished, and the grateful councillors made her their patroness.
Her feast falls around 24 September, and that is when Barcelona throws its biggest party, La Mercè: human towers, fire-runners with sparklers, and the giants dancing in the streets. Yes, the same giants Picasso drew on the architects' college at the start of this walk.
Now the painter. A few steps from here, in 1896, his father rented him his first studio, on Carrer de la Plata, and soon the family had moved to Carrer de la Mercè. In that studio, at fifteen, Picasso painted Science and Charity, a big canvas of a dying woman in bed, a nun holding a child, and a doctor taking her pulse. The model for the doctor was his own father. It won an honourable mention at the national exhibition in Madrid in 1897, and family legend already claimed that, back in A Coruña, his father had handed him his own brushes and given up painting.
It was the perfect academic painting, and Picasso would spend the rest of his life running away from that perfection. Now walk up Carrer d'Avinyó, the narrow street that climbs north from here towards Carrer de Ferran, to the last stop and the most famous painting of the walk.