Spain Guide
Catalunya
Museu d'Art
Address: Next door to the cathedral
Opening time: March– Sept Tues– Sat 10am–7pm, Sun 10am–2pm; Oct– Feb Tues– Sat 10am–6pm, Sun 10am–2pm
Price: €2
Girona's Museu d'Art, in the well-restored episcopal palace, has galleries arranged chronologically as you climb through five floors (the top for temporary exhibits). Lower wings highlight Romanesque and Gothic art, particularly rare manuscripts, such as an amazing martyrology from the monastery of Poblet, and impressive majestats (wooden images of Christ garbed in a tunic).
Other striking objects rescued from country churches include the tenth-century portable altar from Sant Pere de Rodes, one of the few still preserved in Europe, and an intricately detailed twelfth-century crossbeam from Cruïlles. You then progress through Renaissance works – fifteenth-century retablos, polychrome saints and the wonderfully expressive Virgin of Palera, fine tiles and ceramics – to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catalan art on the upper floors, encompassing works by the so-called Olot School of artists, plus some entertaining modernista sculpture.