Antoni Gaudi was born to a coppersmith in June of 1852. From a young age, Gaudi showed an artist talent and ended up attending the Provincial School of Architecture in Barcelona, Spain. Gaudi was part of the Catalan Modernist Movement, or the Art Nouveau Movement; both in which his nature-based flowing organic style thrived. Gaudi concluded his life in Barcelona, Spain in June of 1926. He passed due to a tram accident. Through my research, I have used Laurie Schneider Adams’ Methodologies of Art to analyze Henry Russell Hitchcock’s Gaudi, as well as the style that Gaudi developed.
Gaudi started his life in Catalonia, there he developed an interest in architecture and had hands-on training from …show more content…
He abandoned nearly all other projects to focus on the Sagrada Familia. He built a workshop on-site and began living there in 1910. He started constructing the four bell towers on the Nativity Facade, upon completion there will be 18 towers total. These towers hung above the city, covered in beautifully colored broken tiles, representing the Twelve Apostles, the four Evangelists, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ. Each of these towers start as a square and evolve into “rounded protuberances”. The appearance of the towers derives from parabolic configurations and honey-comb like networks of braces. The towers and columnar braces tapper and twist like have trees grow described as “the labyrinth of towers suggesting an otherworldly forest in stone”. These configurations employed Gaudi’s equilibrated methods and represented a heavily abstract Gothic and Art Nouveau style. It is neo-gothic in appearance with a large amount of exaggerated sculptural details. Based upon Gaudi’s plaster molds and models, the sculptures are meant to be soft, fragile humanistic details in contrast with the brutality of the façade’s surface and size. The Nativity Façade is the only one that Gaudi completed himself, the Glory Façade and Passion Façade were built years after his death.
Hitchcock relates Gaudi’s works the that of the Art Nouveau, an international art movement popular between …show more content…
He mentions the rise and decline of interest in Gaudi’s work, further supporting the idea of art being a historical timeline. Gaudi’s fame grew on an international scale during his lifetime, but his works were abandoned after his death for almost a century. The destruction of Gaudi’s designs during the Spanish Civil War caused work on the Sagrada Familia to halt and was questioned if work should ever start again. Due the scholarly writings in the 1960s, appreciation for Gaudi’s work began to grow again and continues into today. The Sagrada Familia is currently under construction, and is said to be completed in 2026 for the 100-year anniversary of Antoni Gaudi’s