The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya occupies the Palau Nacional on the Montjuïc hillside — a bombastic 1929 neoclassical building that was built for the International Exhibition and has been gradually taken seriously as a museum since its transformation by Gae Aulenti (who also renovated the Musée d'Orsay) in the 1990s. The permanent collection covers Romanesque art, Gothic painting, Renaissance and Baroque works, and the modernista decorative arts that constitute the museum's most specific contribution to understanding Barcelona. The Romanesque collection is the reason to come: 11th and 12th-century apse paintings removed from Pyrenean churches and reinstalled in apse-shaped galleries. The quality of these works, and the decision to remove them from increasingly inaccessible mountain churches for conservation and access, remains contested in Catalonia — which is worth knowing before you stand in front of them. The view from the Palau Nacional over the city through the oval windows is one of the correct ways to see Barcelona's relationship with its own geography.
Montjuïc, Barcelona, Spain