Barcelona Guide
Barri Gòtic
Museu Frederic Marès
Address: Behind Plaça del Rei; entrance through Plaça de Sant Iu, off c/dels Comtes
Opening time: Tues– Sat 10am–7pm, Sun 10am–3pm
Price: €4.20, Wed afternoon & first Sun of month free
Telephone: 932 563 500
Website: www.museumares.bcn.es
An extraordinary display greets visitors in the Museu FredericMarès, which occupies a wing of the old royal palace. The large arcaded courtyard, studded with orange trees, is one of the most romantic in the old town, and the summer café here (Café d'Estiu, open April– Sept; closed Mon) makes a perfect place to take a break from sightseeing.
Frederic Marès (1893–1991) was a sculptor, painter and restorer who more or less single-handedly restored, often not entirely accurately, Catalunya's decaying medieval treasures in the early twentieth century. The ground and basement floors of the museum consist of his personal collection of medieval sculpture – an important body of work that includes a comprehensive collection of wooden crucifixes showing the stylistic development of this form from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. There are also antiquities, from Roman busts to Hellenistic terracotta lamps, while the craftsmanship of medieval masons is displayed in a series of rooms focusing on carved doorways, cloister fragments, sculpted capitals and alabaster tombs.
However, it's the upper two floors, housing Marès' personal collectibles, that tend to make jaws drop. These present an incredible retrospective jumble gathered during fifty years of travel, with entire rooms devoted to keys and locks, pipes, cigarette cards and snuffboxes, fans, gloves and brooches, playing cards, draughtsmen's tools, walking sticks, dolls' houses, toy theatres, old gramophones and archaic bicycles, to list just a sample of what's on show. In the artist's library on the second floor, some of Marès' own reclining nudes, penitent saints and bridling stags give an insight into his more orthodox work.