The first place in the Sagrada Família where Gaudí could really make a mark was when the building works finally reached ground level, at what architectural historians call the chevet – the area that contains the apse at the west end of a church, where the altar is traditionally placed and framed perfectly by a surrounding ambulatory. Just off to one side Gaudí placed the Rosary Chapel with a neo-Gothic entrance arch. For the keen eye the capitals that sit on top of the supporting columns are certainly worth a second look.
On the left a Catalan worker, in traditional costume, wearing the telltale espardenyes, is tempted with a bag full of corrupting gold. On the right, more dramatically, a screaming devil, distorted like the famous anamorphic skull in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, places a sphere into the hand of a kneeling worker. Examined closely, the sculpture reveals that the sphere’s surface is covered with a pattern of blunt nipples which, once filled with the highly sensitive chemical compound mercury fulminate, act as percussion caps on this deadly Orsini bomb. It is as if the carnivalesque, often scurrilous, misericord carvings found hidden under Gothic choir stalls and the surreal world of gargoyles have been blended with contemporary reportage. It is a uniquely strange choice of subject matter for a Christian temple but it sat at the heart of the expiatory spirit of this growing church.
On September 1893 General Martínez Campos, Catalonia’s captain general, miraculously survived an assassination attempt on the Gran Via in Barcelona when the anarchist Paulí Pallàs threw two Orsini bombs at his horse and carriage. Executed a fortnight later with the brutal garrote vil, Pallàs’s ‘martyrdom’ inspired a string of copycat bombings in the name of the anarchist cause. The following month, halfway through Rossini’s William Tell at the Liceu opera house, Santiago Salvador launched two Orsini bombs down from the top tier of ‘the gods’ into the stalls where Barcelona’s fashionable gent de bé sat, killing twenty-two and injuring a further thirty-five. Overnight martial law was enforced, followed by brutal repression and censorship of the anarchist press.
The deadly cat-and-mouse battle between the authorities and the anarchists employed the whole catalogue of dirty tricks, from forced confession by torture, the use of agent provocateurs, to indiscriminate acts of terrorism.
For the innocent caught in the middle, like Gaudí’s worker portrayed on the Rosary Chapel door, what was needed in Bocabella’s opinion was firm Catholic leadership. The abandoned underclass felt differently. They felt sidelined by the stagnant status quo of the political system of turnismo, where the two major parties cynically took turns to share out the spoils. At the same time, for many the Catholic Church offered no real solution to their miserable lives but sat at the very heart of the problem. What the disaffected increasingly demanded was a revolutionary grassroots overhaul that turned society on its head. Sick of the piecemeal measures and the pathetic palliatives that kept the establishment firmly in place, it is not surprising, in hindsight, that a millennial mindset infected the political debate.
In parallel with completing the early foundations of the Sagrada Família, Gaudí had also been working on the Palau Güell, just off Barcelona’s notorious Ramblas. Situated at the gateway to the vice-ridden Raval, the notorious Barri Xino (as it was then known, meaning ‘Chinatown’), opposite a brothel and the louche Edén Concert, it was a strange choice of site for a bourgeois palace, even if it was designed as a kind of moral lighthouse and example to the lumpen poor. The Güells soon tired of it, despite its astronomical cost.
Of greater importance, in terms of its symbiotic relationship to the Sagrada Família, was the pavilion gate entrance Gaudí designed out at Les Corts, once again for Güell. Here at last Gaudí began to feel his way towards the concept of building as narrative. Gaudí was asked to provide a porter’s lodge and stables, small in scale, to flank an entrance gate. Gaudí’s ingenuity was put to the test. Employing the humble materials of adobe and plaster befitting a stable block, he added decorative detail by pushing a mould into the wet plaster to create semi-circular patterns and, more unusually, he carefully inserted small shards of coloured broken tile into the wet mortar. Caught in the right light, the building was enlivened by the cast shadows and sparkling detail.
The real drama and architectural showmanship was focused, however, on the elaborate great iron gate depicting a dragon with its gaping maw reaching out to threaten the visitor.
Working together with Güell, Gaudí had been inspired by his growing friendship with Catalonia’s great poet-priest Jacint Verdaguer. It was Verdaguer’s epic poem L’Atlàntida, published in 1877, which had won him the prestigious title Mestre en Gai Saber (Master Troubadour).
In Verdaguer’s sweeping cantos, the young Columbus, after being shipwrecked, is inspired by the legend of Hercules to continue voyaging and discover America. The epic L’Atlàntida was really a thinly disguised homage to the new Hercules, Eusebi Güell, who had recognised that the new labours were industry and colonial trade as he and his fellow industrialists steered the Catalan economy towards even greater heights. Gaudí focused on a single scene. The dragon Ladón was twisted around Güell’s giant gatepost guarding the golden apples in the legendary Garden of the Hesperides. It had become a favourite theme of the European romantic movement during the nineteenth century, particularly for the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who focused on the orange blossoms and those beguiling Nymphs of the West dancing in the golden night. Gaudí’s interpretation was equally picturesque, yet completely original, playing off the aesthetic tension created by juxtaposing ancient mythology with the immediate thrill and appeal of a fairground attraction. It was pure Gaudí, using dramatic imagery to entertain and instruct.
What the Güell commission also revealed was Gaudí’s growing involvement with the Catholic Church and a highly influential group of churchmen who acted as patrons, friends and mentors. Verdaguer’s position as private chaplain to the Marquès de Comillas provided one important link. In 1887 Gaudí was commissioned to build Bishop Grau’s palace in Astorga. Hailing originally from the Baix Camp, Bishop Grau’s career had successfully mixed a passion for sacred archaeology with his dynamic ministry. In 1888 Gaudí was further awarded a commission by Father Enric d’Ossó to complete the Teresianas convent in Barcelona, which he transformed into a beautiful essay on the hypnotic power of the repeated use of his leitmotif the catenary arch. The rhythmic progression of the space leading down the brilliant white corridors expressed perfectly the intense spirituality of the mystic Saint Teresa of Avila. It was spare and minimalist; a perfect space for quiet contemplation.
The following year, in 1889, the Marquès de Comillas tempted Gaudí to make one of his rare trips beyond Catalonia’s borders to inspect the possibility of building a Franciscan mission in Tangier. The project never got beyond the drawing board, but it did give Gaudí the opportunity to imagine the construction of a wedding-cake cluster of towers with their dramatic silhouette. All these religious commissions would find an echo in the Sagrada Família, acting as laboratories for Gaudí’s relentless search for a higher form.
All was to change at the Sagrada Família with the death of Bocabella on 24 April 1892. The position of president of the junta immediately passed to his son-in-law, Manuel de Dalmases i de Riba, who promptly died months later, as in turn did his successor Francisca Bocabella after a few weeks. Gaudí could still call on the moral support and friendship of Father Manyanet, but the workings of the junta were forced to change. By 1895 the presidency had become institutionalised, with the Bishop of Barcelona inheriting the post. In many ways, bringing the Sagrada Família within the area of responsibility of Barcelona’s bishop brought with it a certain sense of security and continuity.
The calm within the cosy circle of contacts, however, was dramatically rocked in 1894 by the shocking news that the Marquès de Comillas had thrown the famous Verdaguer out of his house. Wild rumours circulated of the poet’s runaway generosity as almsgiver, his unwelcome advice to the marquesa to retire into a convent, and worse still his alleged involvement with exorcism and demonology. Verdaguer railed: ‘Lifelong friends and beloved relatives were treacherously sold off for thirty pieces of silver.’ Bishop Morgades of Vic took Verdaguer under his control and immediately stripped him of priestly office. Verdaguer, broken down, described his pathetic fall from his eminence as the celebrated Mestre en Gai Saber: ‘I’ve become trapped in an iron circle and go round and round without the possibility of escape.’ At the height of Catalonia’s Catholic revival it was a masterclass in hubris, enforced humility and the wide-ranging powers of the Church.
Possibly out of sympathy for his friend, Gaudí’s Lenten fast that year transformed his face into a gaunt and some said ‘heavenly’ mask, and brought him perilously close to death’s door. It is a telling detail that despite the intervention of his father and Dr Santaló, it was only when Bishop Torras i Bages intervened that Gaudí gave up his fast. In Gaudí’s journey towards a deeper faith, 1894 is the key year when the growing myth of his asceticism and association with Saint Francis, the patron saint of the environment, really began to take off.
Despite distractions, Gaudí continued to remain focused on the Sagrada Família. In 1892, Gaudí’s team of more than fifty workmen, guided by his expanding studio of assistants, embarked on laying the foundations for the north-facing Nativity façade. It was both a deliberate and tactical choice. Gaudí later observed, ‘If, instead of building this decorated, richly ornamented façade, we had started with the hard, bare and skeletal Passion façade, people would have rejected it.’ And Gaudí was right. When the much-decorated but distinctly mundane sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs finally took on the Passion façade almost a century later, in 1987, it would prove highly polemical and would receive vicious critical opprobrium reminiscent of the Dominican Father Couturier’s earlier savaging of the banality of Catholic kitsch.
It is at this point, standing in front of Gaudí’s Nativity façade, that we should stop and stare. It is here that we get to experience the alpha and omega of Gaudí’s imagination and its full cosmic range. He would never see it finished, but it remains his most ambitious work.
Above our heads the four honeycomb towers rise skywards in their vertiginous ascent, just as the central triumphal arch, in complete contrast, seems to bear down upon us, creating a curious and uncomfortable sense of dislocation. This is the Burkean sublime playing its dramatic register from awe to terror. As is typical with Gaudí, there are a myriad of architectural precedents informing his design. The Catalan Romanesque tradition of sculpted portals, often painted with polychrome interiors, immediately springs to mind, as does that highly coloured faith machine the Gothic high altar – the retablo mayor. Although traditionally seen as lower down the aesthetic hierarchy, the popular belens – nativity scenes – so prevalent in Catalonia, were quoted here on a massive scale. Never far from Gaudí’s mind were the mystery plays and the sculptural ensemble of the pasos brought to life when paraded through the street during Holy Week. Gaudí also found inspiration in those charming little religious vitrines placed high in their niches in the Barri Gòtic’s narrow streets and the roadside shrines decorated with ex votos. Also, of course, Gaudí could reference the myriad of popular religious plaster models created for mass consumption, the medals, plaques and pressed-tin images that hung off the back of every door.
Gaudí in characteristic fashion would take these ideas and rethink the whole ensemble employing revolutionary new techniques. He would also, and this must have tested the junta’s patience, rethink, rework, pull down and rebuild areas that he felt might be improved. The painstaking attention to detail and the painfully slow progress were surely also reflections of the fact that Gaudí’s funding came from subscriptions and donations, which acted as a brake on hiring a huge team of workers to speed up the work.
The initial idea for the Nativity façade was simple and traditional, with three decorated arches representing Hope, Charity and Faith. The broader sweep of subject matter from left to right narrates with astonishing realism the main events surrounding Jesus’ birth. There are a whole host of different images and enticing details to immediately distract the eye, crowded together and stuck to the surface like barnacles on the cliffs by the sea. At first, the effect of baroque extravagance coupled with Gothic horror vacui is confusing. But once the eye is focused, it is Gaudí’s search for verisimilitude that we notice first.
Legibility is of central importance to Gaudí’s concept, as his main ambition was to create a Bible in stone. His insistence on realism was intended, on one level, to be literal, while leaving very little space for the imagination. Gaudí insisted on the primacy of God’s creation through his faithful imitatio Dei of the Lord’s divine handiwork by insisting, whenever possible, on perfect mimesis.
In terms of art history and the development of sculpture, we should remember that it was in 1876 that Rodin’s nude lifesize sculpture of the soldier Auguste Neyt, entitled The Age of Bronze, had caused a scandal, with critics claiming the sculpture was actually a plaster cast taken directly from life. There were certainly connections between Rodin and Gaudí, with the sculptors Emili Fontbona and Ramon Bonet i Savé working for both. But, more importantly, we should always remember, when looking at the Sagrada Família’s Nativity façade, that in the background there is the looming presence of Rodin’s Gates of Hell.
If some see Gaudí today as traditionalist and conservative, others pick up on his position as a visionary leader of the architectural avant-garde. They are both essentially right. Gaudí was a catalogue of contradictions. Gaudí had no problem with faithful copies of nature using plaster moulds, as we saw with the repeated dwarf palm motif at the Casa Vicens. But for Gaudí, ornament was never just decorative addition: it had to speak. Furthermore, it needed to be faithful to its geographical location by creating a strong sense of Catalan identity. A powerful feeling of attachment had to be promoted through recognition and familiarity so that the New Testament stories felt more contemporary and real. Ornament, Gaudí hoped, could transport the familiar biblical stories onto home soil so that they might be appropriated as moral examples for Barcelona’s lost poor in desperate need of guidance. It was a perfect example of Catholic paternalism. Many of the new urban underclass had poured into the city from the country during the early days of industrialisation. With the arrival of the phylloxera plague in 1879, which destroyed the vineyards in Catalonia, the stream of migrants turned into a flood. Nature, if it was to provide solace, had to be transformed into a residual memory that could be found easily in this nostalgic Eden in stone, where sculpted geese and chickens perpetually pecked at the ground.
There is a good example of Gaudí’s concept on the arch furthest to the left. We are offered the touching scene of the Flight to Egypt, carved in stone on a perfect human scale. The Virgin Mary, with her modesty veiled, sits astride a donkey, accompanied by faithful Joseph and babe in arms. What the innocent viewer will not know is that the donkey is not just any donkey. Gaudí had sent his team out into the nearby streets to scout out an appropriate model – not too well fed – to pass off the illusion of a beast of burden that had travelled more than a hundred miles through the desert. Finally, the right donkey was spotted as a rag-and-bone man foraged the neighbourhood looking for scrap. What ensued is extraordinary. Gaudí had written in a teenage book the observation: ‘It is mad to try to represent a fictional object.’ With the advantage of maturity he later reflected: ‘I believe like Da Vinci that decadence sets in as soon as man forgets to look at nature.’ Gaudí looked at the donkey and decided to let it appear as itself. Hoisting it up in a harness, he proceeded to attempt to cast it in its live entirety in plaster. When it kicked in resistance, it was briefly chloroformed to finish the job and then released and returned. The resulting sculpture lies somewhere between the realms of taxidermy and life-modelling. The same technique was used for the chickens and geese, which were quickly greased up and sedated before being immortalised in stone.
Like a theatrical impresario or the director of a play, Gaudí sought out the appropriate character to create the perfect mise en scène. Gutiérrez, an overweight goatherd who may inadvertently have infected Gaudí with brucellosis by supplying spoilt milk, was the model for the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. Josep, a sad alcoholic who soon died of delirium tremens, fitted the look of the deceitful and guilt-stricken Judas. Standing at a bar in the Barrio of Sant Martí, a six-toed giant, a perfect diabolical freak of nature, was persuaded he would make a perfect model. Cast in the role of Roman centurion, the slaughtered baby innocents lay twisted at his feet as a desperate mother struggles to stay his malevolent arm. The horrible illusion is made doubly shocking by the knowledge that these little innocents were based on actual casts of stillborn children provided by a medical friend of Gaudí’s; the resulting images are as poignant as a death mask yet somehow more affecting and real.
An experiment that went too far could easily have ended in tragedy. Ricard Opisso, one of Gaudí’s assistants, was persuaded to stand for a full-life cast and fainted. Opisso, however, held no grudge; in fact, it was he who persuaded the anarchists in 1936 in the first explosive days of the Spanish Civil War not to desecrate Gaudí’s tomb. Gaudí may have appeared eccentric, with an empirical love for experimentation that appeared to know no bounds, but all his assistants remained fiercely loyal and followed him to the end. Many of them stood to be immortalised as biblical figures stalking the stage across the Nativity façade. These were the main characters, Gaudí’s team of workers, the industrious extended Catholic family, just as it had been 600 years earlier at Santa María del Mar.
What was obvious was that the same techniques of mimesis could be applied to background detail and flora as well. The barley-twist columns flanking the central arch sprout into palms, which in turn support giant snails that are crowned by trumpeting angels. In the space under the arch, usually reserved for archivolts, Gaudí turned cosmic with stone transformed into molten lava, while the signs of the zodiac struggled to escape the fertile chaos and find their final symbolic form. It is immediately reminiscent of the non finito sculptures of Michelangelo but on a much grander scale.
Arriving at the Nativity façade unprepared, it looks at first appearance like a wild pictorial forest struggling to find a meaningful gestalt; halfway between Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the promised Second Coming. A building that seems trapped in a state of flux, both becoming real and yet also melting slowly away.
In a parody of the biblical commandments, Dalí would later write in his personal list of ‘the five principal perfidies’ that ‘those who have not touched the bony structures and the living flesh of his delirious ornamentation are traitors’. ‘Traitors’ is, of course, a perfect example of Dalí’s overblown rhetoric playing to the gallery but, as always, he is wonderfully perceptive. Gaudí’s architecture invariably walked a delicate line between seduction, pleasing the crowd and religious devotion. That is exactly why he is so popular today.
Heading up Gaudí’s team of sculptors was Llorenç Matamala, who had joined him on day one. ‘Come and work with me at the temple, Señor Llorenç, and you will have work for life.’ It was Matamala’s task to transform and scale up Gaudí’s fantasies, which were often tested out first on a more manageable miniature scale. Flowers and vegetation were almost as mechanical as producing the millefleurs background on a medieval tapestry. Details such as shellfish, sea anemones and the sea urchins that had transfixed Gaudí in his youth were also relatively simple. Dividing the central arch were two columns that rested their weight, and that of the precipitous overhang, on the backs of a tortoise and a turtle, one from land and one from the sea, representing universal harmony and longevity and in oriental mythology are often depicted as supporting the world. Gazing up from the central position right to the top, a magnificent cypress tree crowned the central spire. Gaudí insisted on finding exactly the right tree, although he would never see it in place.
If Gaudí’s obsession was to create the illusion of reality, all was not quite what it seemed. Brought up on a diet of magnificent retablos mayores – those overwhelming gold-embossed surfaces that act as faith machines – Gaudí was already thinking about the problems of scale. Some retablos like Pedro Dancart’s sixteenth-century masterpiece at Seville cathedral, which took eighty years to complete, were as tall as five-storey houses. Within their gigantic structures there was often room for offices and changing rooms for the cathedral canons. What the medieval carvers working on these retablos observed was that the size of the figures had to increase the higher up you went if the viewer stood a chance of recognising the scene. Gaudí’s technique of casting directly from life could only really work at eye level and just above. Scaling up the size was relatively easy to calculate depending on the height the object was to be placed. Gaudí, however, developed an entirely new technique that he had already hinted at in the anamorphic devil that had tempted the worker on the Rosary Chapel door. For a figure up high to be read as correct, it didn’t just need to be scaled up, it also had to be distorted and elongated. What was required was a foolproof compensatory method of correcting the sculpture that took into account the perspective of the viewer below.