The story
In the 1920s a team of restorers climbed into remote churches high in the Catalan Pyrenees and peeled the medieval frescoes off their walls. The paintings were being sold abroad piece by piece, and lifting them whole and bringing them to Barcelona was how Catalonia chose to keep them. Reassembled on curved mounts shaped like the original apses, they form the finest collection of Romanesque wall painting anywhere.
The one everyone comes to see is the Christ in Majesty from Sant Climent de Taüll, painted around 1123, a stern wide-eyed figure inside an almond of light that later Catalan artists, Miró among them, treated almost as a national emblem.
All of it fills the Palau Nacional, the vast domed palace thrown up on the hill of Montjuïc for the 1929 International Exposition, on a scale better suited to a coronation than a gallery. Past the Romanesque halls the collection carries on through Gothic altarpieces, a Velázquez and a Zurbarán, and a whole floor of Catalan Modernisme by the contemporaries of Gaudí.
