Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Família
Now and again an art historian may encounter a work that defies conventional categories and beggars description. Just such a work of art is Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Família (more properly, the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família) in Barcelona.
The church began prosaically enough. On a visit to the Basilica of Loreto, the founder of a lay confraternity devoted to St. Joseph was inspired to build a church for prayers to be offered in expiation for the sins of the whole world. It was to be paid for entirely by donations, and by 1882 the confraternity had sufficient funds to begin constructing a conventional Gothic Revival church. The apse end was partially built, with lancet and rose windows, when in 1883 the architect resigned.
Gaudi’s New Forms
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Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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