Barcelona (5 page)

The relation between cash, power, and sanctity was much more briefly expressed by a Majorcan poet named Anselm Turmeda, who at the end of the fourteenth century urged his readers,

 

Diners, doncs, vulles aplegar.

Si els pots haver no els lleixs anar:

Si molts n'hauras poràs tornar

papa de Roma.

 

So you must get money!

If you get it, don't let it go!

If you get a lot, then you can be

The Pope of Rome!

 

So as architecture, the Llotja had a definite mission. It was to affirm the values of the middle class and impress everyone—including, of course, its own members—with their permanent importance. In this sense it was a true cathedral of commerce. There had been an earlier Llotja. But it was small, hardly more than a stone pavilion set back a little from the beach, though designed by a distinguished architect—Pere Llobet, best known today for designing the Saló de Cent in the Ajuntament. It was destroyed by flood tides in the 1350s, and this gave Peter the Ceremonious his opportunity to have it replaced on a much larger scale. The chosen architect was Pere Arbei, and it was the only substantial work he did in Barcelona. All that remains of it is one hall, but it is one of the world's greatest Gothic spaces and it tells us a lot about the essential nature of Catalan Gothic. That nature is wide, rather than tall. English and French fourteenth-century buildings were apt to release their energies, their architectural meaning, through the virtuoso display of their own height. Catalan architects preferred breadth to height: Instead of soaring upward, a habit which the French thought transcendent but which the Catalans felt was somehow flimsy, their buildings spread, enclose, and remind you of their roots in the cave, the grotto; they speak of a sort of troglodytic piety. Width and length, not height, was what gave medieval Catalans a feeling of security and achievement. You see it in the churches, too: in Santa Maria del Pi, for instance, whose single nave is fifty-four feet wide, about a third of its length—an astonishing structural achievement in unsupported, unreinforced stonework, which usually can't carry big spans because of its weakness in tension. English and French Gothic architects reveled in dissolving the wall, turning it into stone lacework, depriving it of solid mass, and substituting glass instead. Not the Catalans of the fourteenth century, who like their Romanesque and Cistercian predecessors liked their buildings to look much stronger, heavier, and opaque.

The main hall of the Llotja, the so-called Sala de Contratacion or Contract Room, where most of the trading deals were hammered out, belongs to this family of structures. It is a big stone box whose roof is carried on three double bays of diaphragm arches. These six arches spring from four tall slender columns, elegantly quatre-foil in section. The arches are round—not pointed, as in northern Gothic—and the roof itself is not vaulted, but flat. It is made of massive beams, closely spaced and laid across the top of the diaphragms. In other words, it is very much the same structural system as the great Saló del Tinell, also designed by an architect working for Peter the Ceremonious, except that there the arches are not borne up on columns at all; they spring directly out of the floor, thus giving the hall the look of an enormous tunnel. Because of its columns, which are fluted and very slender, Pere Arbei's design is lighter and more soaring than this, but it is still nothing like French or English Gothic. You can see the structural system even more plainly from a gallery that runs around the wall of the Contract Room. It's a great interior, very forthright, very moving in its plainness. One of the greatest aspects of Catalan Gothic is its willingness to show you its bones, and that is what the Llotja was designed to do.

It was the basis and center, the meeting point of Catalan financial life. But though the greatness of the building remained, its usefulness did not, at least not indefinitely. The reason, basically, was simple. The old financial centrality of Barcelona was eroded; in effect, it was taken away by Madrid.

A succession of political events tore at the ancient independence of the kingdoms of Aragon and Catalunya. These culminated in 1714, with the conquest of Barcelona by a force of Spanish troops sent by the Bourbon king in Madrid, Felipe V (1683-1746), under the command of the bastard son of King James II, an English general also called the Duke of Berwick and afterward, among his many Spanish titles, El Duque de Liria. He had been sent to break the neck of Catalan resistance, and he did so. Its vestiges now lie in a common grave of the Catalan resisters next to Santa Maria del Mar, where the patriots slaughtered by Berwick's men after the city surrendered are buried.

 

Al fossar de les Moreres

no s'hi einterra cap traidor

Ffins perdent nostres banderes,

sera l'urna de l'honor.

 

In the Moreres graveyard,

no traitor is buried:

Even though we lost our flags

this will be the urn of honor.

 

The siege and conquest of Barcelona, and its reduction to a mere province of Madrid, a vassal state of a centralized Bourbon Spain, naturally had severe results for the Llotja and the work that was done in it. To begin with, the building was badly damaged in the bombardments of the siege—its columns were weakened and there was a fear of collapse. Politically, Barcelona lost much of its trading power and as a punishment for its treasonous hopes of independence from Madrid, it was forbidden to take part in the transatlantic trade with South America—which by now was far more profitable than medieval business relations with the Levant. Business with America would be reserved for Madrid and it would not flow through the Llotja. This did not last long. However, it became one of the most cherished parts of the mythology of Catalan separatism: the belief, still held by some Catalan ultraseparatists down to the present day—not that there are many left now—that the vengeful Bourbons wanted to crush, mangle, and annihilate all aspects of Catalan identity, starting with its language, and that a concerted campaign to impoverish the city was part of this. The villain of the piece, in popular imagination, was Felipe V, who was so hated by most Catalans that, not so long ago, when Barcelona school kids wanted to go to the
cagador
(toilet), they spoke of “going to visit Felipe.” A good deal of this was the mythmaking of local patriotism. But it was true that the Bourbon conquest of Barcelona did close the Llotja down for a while; it was converted into a barracks for Felipe's troops, who had nowhere else to sleep.

However, it was Felipe's son Carlos III (1716-1788) who set Catalan business back on its feet again and made it possible not only to restore the Llotja but to greatly expand it and its influence. He did the first of these by lifting the ban on Barcelona's trade with the South American colonies—Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the rest. From now on Catalan ships would be shuttling across the Atlantic, and Catalan venture capitalists would be founding impressive fortunes everywhere from Lima to Havana. To cope with the new scale of business, the Llotja had to be modernized and expanded. Its antiquated Gothic form would no longer do.

Carlos III was, by earlier standards, a moderately enlightened monarch. His tastes were neoclassic and he liked to see building on a grand scale, in the Italian manner. When he was the monarch of Naples, he had overseen the grandiose construction of the Palazzo di Caserta, and in Madrid he had brought in the Italian architect Filippo Juvarra to supervise the building of the enormous Palacio Real with its 1,200 rooms. Clearly, his glories as a patron of Catalan business were not going to be increased by merely restoring an old Gothic building that had been badly damaged by his father's armies. His administration, therefore, encouraged the Junta de Comerc to go ahead with what amounted to the construction of a new Llotja, in the style that the taste of his reign preferred, not a nostalgic Gothic but what was considered the newest and best: an orderly, finely proportioned if rather heavy kind of neoclassicism, a shell which enclosed the old Gothic core and left no hint of its existence on the outside. Barcelona was not rich in neoclassic architects, but there was one who seemed to fit the requirements. Born in 1731, his name was Joan Soler i Faneca, and the new Llotja, for which he started drawing up plans in 1764, was his first major building in Barcelona. There would be two others, neither of the same importance: the Palau Sessa-Larrard, finished in 1778, and the Casa March de Reus, done in 1780.

All three are in the sober, conservative, and rather uninventive style that was de rigeur in later eighteenth-century Barcelona, but the best of them—indeed, the best neoclassic building in the city—was Soler's design for the Llotja. It has had a curious and hybrid past. It was finished in 1804 and for a while in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries half its top floor housed the main art school in Barcelona,
Escola de Bellas Artes
(School of Fine Arts). Picasso's father taught there, and young Pablo studied there in the late 1890s, as did Joan Miró and many lesser known nineteenth-century Catalan painters and sculptors. As a building it is balanced and elegant. Most of the decorative sculpture is mediocre, as sculpture tended to be in Barcelona, but there is one work of genuinely outstanding quality, a figure of the virtuous Lucrezia dying, having stabbed herself after her rape by the villainous Tarquin. It was finished in 1804 by the Catalan artist Damià Campeny, who had moved to Rome and worked there most of his life in a high neoclassic style derived from Antonio Canova.

Soler's design of the windows is plain, with very minimal detailing. The entrance courtyard is beautifully proportioned, and it contains the most memorable and interesting part of the building: the sweeping, double staircase, intensely sculptural, which undulates in a way that reminds me of Gaudí. In fact it may have had some influence on Gaudí, Barcelona's greatest architect. For it was Gaudí who helped to found a very influential society of artists called the Artistic Circle of St. Luke. It was ultraconservative, ultranationalist, and ultra, ultra Catholic, very much opposed to the kind of freethinking and ironic modernism that was practiced by Ramón Casas and Santiago Rusinyol in Els Quatre Gats café. Except for Gaudí and the sculptor Josep Llimona, none of its members went on to have a great effect on Catalan art, let alone Spanish art in general. But the interesting thing to me is that to go to the meetings the “Lukes” had in the art school, they had to go up that pierced and twisting staircase in the Llotja, and I don't think it's at all fanciful to see in its serpentine and almost liquid shapes the genesis of certain forms of Gaudí's maturity, in the Casa Batlló for instance, or even the Casa Milà.

But we are getting ahead of the story. The first building boom in Barcelona produced a great deal more than its stock exchange and the Saló de Cent. In terms of industrial fourteenth-century architecture, the greatest surviving example in the world stands just back from the Barcelona waterfront: the Drassanes or shipyards, a masterpiece of civil engineering built by the architect Arnau Ferre and finished in 1378, during the reign of Peter the Ceremonious—a set of long parallel bays made of brick, their tiled roofs carried on great diaphragm arches. In its plain and imposing spaces, the biggest vessels in the Mediterranean were built, right up to the end of the seventeenth century. A facsimile of one such vessel, the
Capitana,
or flag-ship, in which Don Juan of Austria led the Christians to victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, occupies a whole bay: a sleek baroque war machine encrusted with gilt and red lacquer, 195 feet long, driven by fifty-eight oars each as thick as a telegraph pole and worked by nearly six hundred chained slaves. A mile away, in one of the chapels of the Cathedral, stands the justly celebrated “Christ of Lepanto,” a wooden sculpture carved from an elm trunk, twisted in
contrapposto
in the form of an
s:
a miracle, the story goes, because the Redeemer saw a cannonball heading straight at him from a Turkish bow chaser and, with divinely quick reflexes, twisted out of its way.

Then the reign of Peter the Ceremonious produced some remarkable structures which, though they weren't religious, had a very strong ceremonial presence in the life of the city. Notably the huge banqueting hall, which sometimes served as a parliament in the 1370s, known as the Saló del Tinell. North of the Pyrenees, English and French Gothic architects focused on emphasizing the height of their structures, supporting the walls with flying buttresses. In Catalunya the opposite occurs. The wall remains earthbound, defined by mass. Or there is no wall—as in the Saló del Tinell, a tunnel which retains a ghost memory of the Pyrenean cave. The basic form of a medieval Catalan church is one big nave, no aisles, and a polygonal apse at one end with a choir at the other. Single-nave churches of this kind can be very wide indeed. One Catalan architectural historian pointed out that when a Catalan entered a long, narrow French cathedral nave he felt it lacked coziness, which medieval Catalans felt they had a right to expect from the
casa pairal de déu,
God's family house, where they gathered at the altar like brothers, sisters, and cousins at the llar de foc, the capacious and inviting fireplace—the cave, again.

Stone is not difficult to build high, because it is so strong in compression. But building wide introduces bending stresses, and these entail tension. And stone is weak in tension. Because we live in an age of steel and reinforced concrete, we take very wide spans for granted. In the fourteenth century, however, wide spans in stone were a marvel, and the Catalan architects were unsur-passed in their construction.

The widest vaulted nave in Europe (seventy-eight feet, only five feet narrower than the colossal barrel vault of St. Peter's in Rome) is that of the fourteenth-century Catedral de Girona in Catalunya.