{"id":2985,"date":"2007-02-11T09:04:30","date_gmt":"2007-02-11T09:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/hughes-on-barcelona.html"},"modified":"2007-02-11T09:04:30","modified_gmt":"2007-02-11T09:04:30","slug":"hughes-on-barcelona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/hughes-on-barcelona.html","title":{"rendered":"Hughes on Barcelona"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Hughes takes a look at the cultural heritage of Barcelona<\/a> through the prism of a forthcoming exhibit at the Met.<\/a> There’s more to Barcelona than Gaudi, although he towers above the rest, naturally enough. Some things I didn’t know:<\/p>\n

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In the latter years of his life, when making the figures for the Nativity facade of the Sagrada Familia, he made literal transcriptions from nature, by chloroforming birds and even a donkey in order to cast them in plaster. Sometimes this effigy-making was of a rather gruesome kind; in order to make infants for his scene of the Slaughter of the Innocents, he got permission from the Hospital of the Holy Cross on the Ramblas to cast the corpses of stillborn babies in plaster; live ones could not be used since they could not be prevented from moving. There exists an old photo of the inside of one of Gaud\u00ed’s studios, looking like a charnel-house, with plaster bodies and limbs hanging on every wall. But what mattered most to him were the forms and structural principles that could be deduced from inanimate matter, plants and rock-forms especially.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Hughes takes a look at the cultural heritage of Barcelona through the prism of a forthcoming exhibit at the Met. There’s more to Barcelona than Gaudi, although he towers above the rest, naturally enough. Some things I didn’t know: In the latter years of his life, when making the figures for the Nativity facade…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nHughes on Barcelona - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/hughes-on-barcelona.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hughes on Barcelona - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Robert Hughes takes a look at the cultural heritage of Barcelona through the prism of a forthcoming exhibit at the Met. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}