The story
High on the saw-toothed mountain of Montserrat, beneath the square of a Benedictine monastery, hangs a Caravaggio. Saint Jerome Penitent dates from around 1605 or 1606, and a monk of the abbey, Father Bonaventura Ubach, bought it at an auction in Rome in 1917 for his abbot, who was trying to rebuild the monastery's heritage.
Ubach is the reason there is a museum here at all. A biblical scholar, he lived in Jerusalem for four years and travelled through Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia collecting objects to illustrate the Bible, and from 1911 they were shown in a small room of the monastery. Those finds from the ancient Near East are still part of the visit, displayed with the painting galleries in a space under the square that the modernist architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch designed in 1929 as a restaurant for pilgrims.
The old masters include a Penitent Magdalene by El Greco, the Cretan-born painter of Toledo, with her ointment jar and a skull. Later rooms turn to French Impressionists and to Catalan painting of the 19th and 20th centuries, much of the latter from the collection of Josep Sala. The best known Catalan picture is Au Moulin de la Galette by Ramon Casas, painted in 1892 while he was living at that Montmartre dance hall, a portrait of the model Madeleine Boisguillaume.
