Núria Prat i Pere de Llobet What lies beneath the visible polychromy? The carving is of Saint Nicholas of Bari, dressed in bishop’s robes, with mitre and chasuble. With his right hand he is blessing and in the other hand, now lost, he was most probably holding the crozier. The carving is Gothic, while the…
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The museum has jointly co-published with Norma Editorial the comic, Gothic, by the writer Jorge Carrión and the artist Sagar Fornies. In this they explore the Medieval Gothic Art collection of the Museu Nacional. Jorge Carrión explains the creative process of the publication. It’s difficult to change habits, above all if they have given you…
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Martí Casas As the Christmas festivities approach, just about everyone at home is clear about which figures can’t be missing in a crib, just as it should be: the Holy Family, the ox and the mule, the three wise men with their pages…and of course we can’t forget the caganer! Taking a look at the…
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Cèsar Favà On 31 May the Decapitation of Saint Baudilus, by Lluís Dalmau, originally in Sant Boi de Llobregat, was sold at auction and purchased by the museum thanks to funding by the Palarq Foundation. From this week and coinciding with Museu Nacional Night 2017, it is temporarily on display in room 17 of the…
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Mireia Mestre The properties of gold, the bright yellow colour, the ductility and the fact of it being immutable, have been ideal, not just for minting coinage, but also for its use in the arts of every civilization. It has always been a rare, precious, material, reserved for worship, associated with eternity and divine power,…
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Cèsar Favà The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya’s Gothic Art collection has a varied group of works that enables us to see the different views that Christianity spread of the Jews in the early Middle Ages. Here we shall discuss some images in which the figure of the Jew is portrayed in an openly negative…
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On the basis of its style, a small fragment from an altarpiece in the collection of the Ulm Museum (Germany) can be attributed to the painter Joan Mates, one of the principal exponents of Catalan Gothic. With the attribution of this piece – of singular iconography – to this artist, not only has the painter’s…
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The use of incisions by the artist As we saw in the previous post, once the panel had been prepared with the different layers of plaster, the artist made the preparatory sketch. He began with sticks of charcoal and, when it was done, he half erased it with a feather; he then went over the entire drawing…
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The panel of The princess Eudoxia in front of the tomb of Saint Stephen of the altarpiece of Saint Stephen of Granollers represents the Roman Emperor Theodosius II and Empress Eudoxia leading their daughter, the princess Eudoxia, possessed by the devil, in front of the relics of Saint Stephen. It shows the moment of the…
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Faced with illnesses, spells, and many other dangers that threatened their survival, the men and women from the middle ages often placed their hopes for healing or protection in the power, so they believed, that emanated from certain objects. Walking through the Gothic art collection of the museum, which has a major thematic wealth, we…
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