Gaudi on Thanksgiving

We're doing a Thanksgiving dinner tonight, with not one but two types of turkey, the good ol' American kind and some newfangled stuffed roll that is allegedly more Italian. So they told me, anyway. The whole studio is filled with mingling aromas, some familiar, some exotic, and I carried the memory in my head after I finished my cereal and left.

We've got today off, and so following the prompting of a sign on the side of a bus and the bilingual directions of the slightly-confused cashier at the Spanish bookshop in Piazza Navona, I turned up at the Chiostro de Bramante next to Santa Maria della Pace to have a look at the new art and architecture exhibition Gaudi e il modernismo catalano.

Gaudi is one of my favorite architects, a sort of free-form art nouveau genius or roccoco medievalist. He simply defies description; trying to link him to Catalan modernismo is somewhat of a tenuous leap, for he himself seems to have felt a closer allegiance not to up-to-the-minute urbanity but medieval guildsman and the ancient classical traditions of the Mediterranean. I can't help but agree, even though sometimes it's hard to figure out where to plug the saintly old architect into the classical canon. That doesn't make it any less true.

It's hard to say what in his architecture makes this believable, but it's there, somewhere, in the drip-castle Gothic impressionism of the Sagrada Familia, the cubist morisco flourishes of his early works or the hallucinogenic Sesamee Street dragonscale dreamscape of his apartment blocks. Nonetheless, he had his followers, and it is a delight to see his work in context.

Professor D., who is picky with his exhibits, would have probably considered it a bit "lame" (his own words) given he would have probably expected a few more models of Sagrada Familia and maybe a dancing bear or two. I found it delightful, walking through the spare Renaissance rooms of the cloister as if in a trance. Semester's end and urban life and a thousand other things had worn me a little thin over the last week and here I seemed finally to find soporific comfort.

It was, like a dream, a wondrous mix of familiar and unfamiliar; simple things well-designed and well-designed simple things. There were some of the old standards I'd seen before in glossy photographs, like the stupendous wrought-iron gateway of Casa Vicens with its palm leaves and undulating spikes, or dozens of new surprises in the form of works on paper, drawings, posters, bookcovers all so full of fresh art nouveau life and industrial Catalan spunk. So many virginal cousins of pre-Rapheaelite women, and so many well-dressed, smiling bourgeois daughters of Barcelona. Both were part of Gaudi's world, the timeless and the secular. Sometimes the two came together, though.

For then there was The First Communion. It is, by far, the most ambitious piece of terra-cotta ever produced. I went back three times to gaze upon it in my semi-stupor, to try and sketch at least one visual sliver of it. The sculptor's name was Josep Llimona, and nobody has heard of him, it seems.

It shows two young girls, two unearthly and pure young girls, though they were probbaly the daughters of some merchant or industrialist or whatever. One has just bent in to receive the Host on her tongue, showing a rim of pearly front teeth between parted lips. The other demurely looks down. It's almost life-size, showing them from the shoulders up, their hands and backs seeming to dissolve into the trailing draperies that cover their hands and heads and even the rail and one girl's prayerbook. Neither my drawings or the catalogue photo even hope to do it justice.

Eventually, I took a final turn out into the upper story of the cortile proper, pausing for a minute on one of the cold marble seats set into the base of the delicate Bramante columns. It's a wonderful, serene, cool little space, so rigorous in line and yet so natural in feel, a counterpoint to the theatrical effect that art nouveau produced with its undulating, vegetal curves. But both are wonderful to behold.

The sky was cloudy and grey above one side, but over the great octagonal dome of Santa Maria della Pace (of Peace!), it began to be veined with blue and silver-gilt. A little out-of-place Gothic spire, perhaps that of Santa Maria dell' Anima (of Souls!), the old German church, rose up next to it. It seemed almost the work of Gaudi with its delicate tilework roof and elaborate wrought-iron eagle finial. And yet it all harmonized. Peace and souls, perfect.

The sun was coming out, and there were many things to be thankful for. And, as strange as that may sound, I can't think of a better way to celebrate today.