GAUDÍ, Antoni

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, Spanish Catalan architect. He was one of the most original designers of his generation. Beginning with a deep interest in Catalonia's medieval history and architecture combined with a respect for craftsmanship and structural logic, he used nature as a source of inspiration for structure and ornament to develop a highly personal, organic style. This style is characterized by sculptural plasticity, the manipulation of light and the use of mosaics and polychromy. Later he was acclaimed as a geniusGLOSSARYin classical Rome, a person's invisible tutelary god. In art from the classical period onwards, the low-ranking god was depicted as a winged, usually childish figure. of Catalan Modernisme, a style related to Art Nouveau, but his work went far beyond ornament to embrace a more fundamental representation of nature through a structural form.

Gaudí was both devout and socially committed. In order to be able to translate his ideas into practice, he decided to become an architect, and from 1873 to 1878, he went to the Escola Superior d'Architectura in Barcelona. Even while he was still a student, he gained his first commissions. In 1883, he took over the site management of La Sagrada Familia church, financed entirely from offerings and donations, and this project remained closest to his heart to the end of his life. In the same year, he became acquainted with his patron and later friend, Count Eusebi Güell, for whom he built the Palau Güell in 1886-89. In 1900, the Count commissioned him to build a garden suburb (now the Parc Güell), which reflects Gaudí's endeavours to design and build his structures that have the effect of being an organic part of nature.

Gaudí's architecture is different not only from anything that had gone before in Barcelona but also from the work of his contemporaries. His stylistic borrowings are mainly from Catalan GothicGLOSSARYGothic, which may well have originated with Alberti as a derogatory term and which certainly corresponds to Vasari's 'maniera tedesca' ('German style'), is properly the descriptive term for an artistic style which achieved its first full flowering in the Ile de France and the surrounding areas in the period between c. 1200 and c. 1270, and which then spread throughout northern Europe. It is characterized by the hitherto unprecedented integration of the arts of sculpture, painting, stained glass and architecture which is epitomized in the great cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims or in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. In all the arts the predominantly planar forms of the Romanesque are replaced by an emphasis on line. There is a transcendental quality, whether in the soaring forms of the pointed arches or in the new stress on the humanity of Christ, which similarly distinguishes it from the preceding Romanesque style. In thinking of Nicola (d. c. 1284) or Giovanni Pisano (d. after 1314) there is same danger of forgetting what had happened in French sculpture half a century or more earlier, and likewise it is hard to remember that the spectacular achievements of early Renaissance art are a singularly localized eddy in the continuing stream of late gothic European art. By northern European standards few Italian works of art can be called gothic without qualification, and the story of 13th and 14th century Italian architecture is as much one of resistance to the new style as of its reception, whether directly from France or through German or central European intermediaries. In sculpture and in painting, the Italian reluctance to distort the human figure, conditioned by a never wholly submerged awareness of the omnipresent antique heritage, gives a special quality to the work of even those artists such as Giovanni Pisano or Simone Martini who most closely approached a pure gothic style. Nevertheless, the vitalizing role of Northern gothic art throughout the early Renaissance and the period leading up to it should never be underestimated. The artistic, like the cultural and commercial, interaction was continuous and much of the Italian achievement is incomprehensible if seen in isolation. It is not merely at the level of direct exchanges between one artist and another, or the influence of one building; painting, manuscript or piece of sculpture upon another, that the effects are to be felt. The streaming quality of line which is so characteristic of Brunelleschi's early Renaissance architecture surely reflects a sensitivity to the gothic contribution which is entirely independent of, and lies much deeper than, the superficial particularities of form. The counterflow of influence and inspiration from South to North must likewise not be underrated. In particular, the contribution of Italian painters from Duccio and Simone Martini onwards is central to the evolution of the so-called International Gothic style developing in Burgundy, Bohemia and north Italy in the late 14th and early 15th centuries.. His efforts to improve Gothic structural systems statically, coupled with his love of experimentation and fantastic imagination, produced some unusual structural forms. His use of multi-coloured mosaics in ornamentation and the play of light and space transform his buildings into monumental sculptures. His mosaic, furniture and other craft objects are likewise distinguished for their abstract forms and the recreation of objects in unfamiliar guises.

Antoni Gaudí's major architectural works are the following.

La Sagrada Familia (1882-1926) Casa Vicens (1883-85) Finca Güell (1884-87) Palau Güell (1886-89) Cripta de la Colònia Güell (1898-1914) Parc Güell (1901-14) Casa Batlló (1904-06) Casa Milà (1906-10)