Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)

The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya occupies the Palau Nacional, a monumental building constructed for the 1929 International Exposition on the slopes of Montjuïc, its central dome and grand staircase overlooking the Magic Fountain and the city below. The museum's defining collection is its Romanesque art, made up of murals, wooden sculptures, and altar frontals removed from small Pyrenean village churches in the early 20th century, a rescue effort undertaken as the frescoes faced deterioration and the risk of being sold abroad; the apse paintings, some dating to the 11th and 12th centuries, were physically detached from their original church walls and reinstalled in reconstructed architectural settings within the museum, an unusual conservation approach that preserves both the art and its original spatial context. Beyond the Romanesque galleries, the museum holds an extensive Gothic collection of Catalan altarpieces and a significant body of Catalan Modernisme and Noucentisme painting from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including works by Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusiñol. The galleries are organized chronologically, moving visitors from the Romanesque church reconstructions through Gothic altarpieces, Renaissance and Baroque painting, and finally into the Modernisme rooms associated with the same fin-de-siècle Barcelona that produced Gaudí's architecture. The Palau Nacional's grand interior, with its restored central dome hall originally built for exposition ceremonies, provides an appropriately monumental setting for a collection spanning nearly a millennium of Catalan art. Ongoing conservation work focuses particularly on the fragile Romanesque murals, whose pigments require controlled lighting and humidity to prevent further deterioration after their removal from unheated mountain chapels decades ago.