Word into Image: Apocryphal Infancy Gospel Motifs on Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Familía Nativity Façade

Abstract

Abstract: The Early Christian and medieval Infancy Gospels' legend of Jesus animating clay sparrows and being chastised for it by his father is depicted on one of the sculptures on the nativity facade of the basilica Sagrada Familía in Barcelona, made between 1883 and 1926 by the Catalan Modernist architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). There, a youthful Jesus holds a bird while a grand and parental Joseph gazes fixedly at him. No scholarly discussion of this portion of the Sagrada Familía's nativity façade refers to the Infancy Gospels in their various medieval embodiments as a source for this sculpture's iconography, even if such a connection is readily apparent to medievalists. This sculpture propagandizes for a Vatican-inspired Josephism, a powerful late-nineteenth-century European ecclesiastical movement especially important in Barcelona. Its iconography alludes to conflict between father and son in the Infancy Gospels, one that the architect hopes to resolve through his Josephism. The conception of Joseph as a weak and passive husband and father upstaged by Mary changed radically by the early modern period, so that a new Joseph, vigorous and even youthful, a strong and participatory father, and a caring and saintly husband, eventually began to appear in modern-era European devotional writing and art. An exploration of this story of the sparrows and some of its ramifications in the relations of Jesus and Joseph in the modern era will offer medieval art historians and general medievalists some insight into and further questions about the complex relationship among medievalism, labor, and Catalan nationalism in turn-of-the-century Catalonia.