The paintings in the museum were peeled off the walls of churches two hundred kilometres away

There is a painted Christ on Montjuïc that turns up in every survey of medieval art ever written. It is about nine hundred years old, it is the single most reproduced image in Catalonia, and it is not from Barcelona.

It is from a church in a valley in the Pyrenees, and it is in a museum on a hill in a city because somebody took it off the wall.

The museum does not hide this. It publishes the operation, the dates, the technique and the man who did it, which is a great deal more than most museums do about how their collections arrived. What follows is that account, in its own words, plus the two things it leaves out.

What happened, and when

The most important part of the collection of mural painting of the museum was gathered together in an operation carried out between 1919 and 1923.

Between the autumn of 1919 and 1923, the paintings were acquired, they were removed from their original support, the walls of the churches, and they were transferred to Barcelona, where they were fixed to another support and made ready to be exhibited in the museum.

The body that did it was the Junta de Museus de Barcelona, and the museum credits the decisive action to its director at the time, Joaquim Folch i Torres.

The groundwork was older. In 1907 an expedition — the Missió a la Ratlla d’Aragó, with Josep Puig i Cadafalch at its head — had gone up into the Pyrenean valleys and, in the museum’s phrase, definitively made the Romanesque paintings of those churches known.

Twelve years later somebody sold one.

The apse that went to America

This is the trigger, in the museum’s own sentence:

It had been discovered that the Romanesque paintings of the church of Santa Maria de Mur, in the Pallars Jussà, had been sold and removed from the wall. It was therefore considered that the rest of the Catalan Romanesque mural painting was at risk.

On every MNAC page we opened, the destination is a museum in the United States. It never says which.

The museum that has it does say, and its provenance record is worth reading slowly. In 1919 the frescoes were sold by the rector of the church to Ignasi Pollak, removed, and sold on to the Barcelona collector Lluís Plandiura. In 1921 Plandiura sold them, through a New York intermediary, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for 92,100 dollars. Accession date: 5 May 1921.

So the rescue campaign was set off by a village priest selling his apse, and the apse reached Boston two years after the campaign began — not before it.

And there is a wrinkle in the rescue story that the museum does not draw attention to and we will, because it is on the record. The collector who sold the Mur apse to Boston is the same Plandiura whose collection of 1,869 works the museum itself bought in 1932.

Strappo

Here is the part visitors almost never know they are looking at.

Nearly all the Romanesque mural paintings of the museum were removed from the walls using the Strappo technique, that is to say, only the pictorial layer is extracted, leaving the plaster coating on the original wall.

Read that again. Only the paint comes off. The plaster stays on the church.

The catalogue record for the Pantocrator gives its medium in four words that say everything: fresco transferred to canvas, and remains of tin leaf. What you stand in front of on Montjuïc is a skin of twelfth-century pigment, lifted off its wall and stuck to cloth.

The man who did it was Franco Steffanoni, an Italian restorer, working from 1919 to 1923 with two assistants the museum names — Cividini and Dalmati. The technique had a lineage: the museum traces it to Antonio Contri, who first experimented with strappo in Cremona in 1730, and to the restoration school Giovanni Secco Suardo founded in Bergamo in the mid-nineteenth century, of which Steffanoni was a disciple.

Two things we are not going to inflate. It was Steffanoni with two named assistants, not Steffanoni and sons — that version circulates and the museum does not support it. And the museum attaches Bergamo to Secco Suardo’s school, not to Steffanoni’s birthplace.

The Pantocrator

The apse of Sant Climent de Taüll, by the painter the museum calls the Master of Taüll. Its record dates the ensemble from the consecration of the church in 1123 by Bishop Ramon de Roda d’Isàvena.

If you go up to the Vall de Boí — and it is a serious drive, not a day trip from Barcelona — what is in the apse now is a video mapping that recreates the original frescoes. The valley’s own heritage centre explains why: a painted plaster copy had been there since the 1960s and was deteriorating.

The churches themselves are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed on 30 November 2000, and the Generalitat had declared the whole group an asset of cultural interest in 1992. The buildings are the half of the work nobody removed, and they are still standing in the landscape they were built for.

Where the museum contradicts itself

One page of the museum’s site says the Generalitat took on the work of removing the paintings, passing them to fabric and transporting them. Every other page says the Junta de Museus.

The Junta is the one to use, and the reason is a date: the Generalitat was not restored until 1931, eight years after the campaign ended. We are pointing at it rather than quietly picking the right one, because a museum disagreeing with itself is useful information about how settled any of this is.

A second thing worth knowing: the paintings did not come straight to this building. The museum’s own FAQ says the Junta installed them in the Museu d’Art i Arqueologia in the Ciutadella. They only moved to Montjuïc in the early thirties, into a palace built for a trade fair.

What we could not find out

• How many churches were stripped, and how many ensembles are in the museum. Numbers circulate. The MNAC publishes none on any page we opened, so we are not giving you one.
• Whether the removal is contested today. We could not find an objection, a restitution claim or a critical statement from the Vall de Boí, from Lleida institutions, from the Generalitat or from an academic repository. That is not found, which is not the same as does not exist, and we are not going to write the argument in either direction.

The question is obviously there. An operation that took the paintings out of a hundred kilometres of valley and concentrated them in the capital is exactly the sort of thing that gets re-litigated. We just do not have a source, and inventing the controversy would be as bad as inventing the consensus.

The building, and the practical bit

The Palau Nacional was the centrepiece of the 1929 Exposition, and the museum says its dome was inspired by St Peter’s in the Vatican. The museum was inaugurated on 11 November 1934 — the opening had been set for 7 October and was postponed because of what happened in Barcelona that month.

After a long remodelling by Gae Aulenti it reopened in three stages: Romanesque in December 1995, Gothic in July 1997, and complete on 16 December 2004.

Inside there are seven collection areas: Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, modern art, drawings, prints and posters, photography, and numismatics. The museum describes the Romanesque panel painting as the biggest and oldest collection in Europe.

We are not printing admission arrangements or hours, because they change and this page should not. What we will say is the scheduling consequence: this museum is a half day on its own. If you are giving Montjuïc four or five hours in total, going inside means not doing the castle, and that is a real choice rather than a bit of advice — see is Montjuïc worth it.

Why we talk about it on the way past

Our Montjuïc walk does not go inside. It goes up the hill through the fairground, on to the castle and out to the quarry behind it, which is a full afternoon on its own.

But it passes the front of this building, and the argument is worth ninety seconds on the staircase, because it is the same argument the rest of the hill keeps making and the same one the old city makes: Barcelona is a city that moves things. It moved a fifteenth-century house across the Barri Gòtic, it rebuilt a German pavilion fifty-six years after taking it down, and in 1919 it sent an Italian restorer into the Pyrenees to bring back the paint and leave the plaster.

Whether that was rescue or removal is a conversation. Whether it happened is not, and the museum is the one telling you.

Getting up here at all, including which of the three cable-car-shaped things you actually want, is how to get to Montjuïc.

The staircase and the luminous fountains in front of this building are the Magic Fountain, rebuilt in 2024 and 2025 after two and a half years dry.

One more reason to keep this hill in reserve: it is the best wet-weather afternoon in the city, and most people write Montjuïc off when the forecast turns.