Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya ★

The grandiose MNAC in Barcelona. (Photo by Sergi Larripa)

Amazing Catalan Romanesque art in a museum high above Barcelona

Frescoes (c. 1120s) from the apse of the church of Santa Maria de Taüll in the MNAC. (Photo by Enric Fontvila)In an enormous 1929 palace atop Montjuïc hill is the MNAC, one of the world’s biggest and best collections of Romanesque art, centered around a series of gorgeous 12th-century frescoes removed from Catalonian churches in the Pyrenees.

The late-Medeival art is actually just the highlight. The point of this museum is to catalogue the best of Catalan art from the Romanesque all the way to the 1940s.

That means there is also a good store of Gothic art and sculpture from across the Northern Mediterranean, an era when the Counts of Barcelona expanded their empire over large swathes of the Iberian Peninsula and halfway into what is now France.

(The Renaissance and baroque collection is no great shakes.)

Outside the palace is a network of stair-stepping fountains that star in a sound and light show on summer nights (Thursday through Sunday).

Tips & Links

The Retaule de Sant Vicenç (St. Vincent Altarpiece), a 1438–40 masterpiece of Catalan Romanesque by Bernat Martorell in the MNAC.

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