Celestial and Strange: On Art that Disrupts
By Annelise Jolley

“The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.” — Antoni Gaudí

Antoni Gaudí was swept off this earth in the rush of an oncoming tram. Dressed in his usual ragged clothing, he was brought to Barcelona’s beggar’s hospital. By the time the city realized that the tramp was, in fact, Catalonia’s beloved architect, Gaudí was dead.

It’s a strange end for a strange man, an enigmatic artist from whose brain poured the architecture of fiction: dripping stone, funhouse curves, ceramic tiles pasted on exteriors like teeth. Devout and ascetic, Gaudí lived somewhere between Spain’s most celebrated architect and a holy fool. Rumours have him subsisting on lettuce leaves dipped in milk and fasting for 40 days at a time. Words critics have used to describe him: Fervent. Ambitious. Fanatic.

Last July, I arrived at the Sagrada Familia—Gaudí’s most famous and as-yet-incomplete work—tired of churches. My husband and I were midway through a four-month trip spanning Mexico, a good chunk of Europe, and touching down in the Middle East. The trip was something we had planned for and worked for and dreamed of for years. Some days felt charmed and some days were like this one: just a day, with all the discomforts and old habits that come with it.

On that morning Barcelona’s noise and chaos and July heat prickled my skin. Standing in line outside the church, my husband absorbed my complaints as parents near us absorbed the whining of small children. Now two months into our travels, we had visited our fair share of churches. I knew what to expect: step from the sun into a cool sanctuary, let your eyes adjust, look up to the ceiling, view the chapels flanking the nave, listen to the priest rumble out Mass for a handful of congregants. It was less that the churches themselves were uninspired and more that my faith was. The Gospel, the most bewildering story we tell, had become dull with familiarity.

Gaudí began designing the Sagrada Familia at age 31 in a style both soaring and childlike. You’ve seen pictures: the spires like drip castles made of mud, their peaks rising over Barcelona. Baubles top the steeples, a Christmas tree hangs above the Nativity facade like an ornament, and blocky letters spelling “Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus” ripple over stone. The temple’s central tower is designed to reach 560 feet; when it is complete, the Sagrada Familia will be the tallest church in the world.

Seeing it from afar is one thing. Seeing it up close is like seeing the whirl of life under a microscope: an object you thought static brimming with movement. When we made it through the line and finally stood in the shade of the temple doors, my prickliness evaporated. I felt the zeroed-in intensity that I do when reading poetry or hearing, for the first time, what will become a favourite song.

The first facade is the Nativity. It’s covered with sculptures telling the story of Christ’s birth from different vantage points: the animals, the shepherds, the Holy Family. The sculpture style appears traditional, until you look a bit closer. Over the Holy Family float the heads of angels and oxen, whose faces are inlaid with stars. These bulls and cherubs watch the scene through a celestial veil, like unborn infants through embryonic sacs: otherworldly and luminous.

I step through the Nativity facade into the temple’s interior, audio-guide headphones installed in my ears. Entering the Sagrada Familia feels like walking underwater or like walking on a forest floor. Pillars soar upward, imitating trees or giant kelp. On the ceiling, portholes of glass filter in sunlight. Gaudí designed the church to reflect the natural world, distinct from the Gothic churches of Europe that feel like fortresses against the world’s wildness.

The interior is celestial, and it is also childlike. A sea turtle supports a pillar and bunches of grapes hang from a canopy over the altar. Gaudí’s touches have an irreverent, near-kitschy quality—a levity toward ideas normally depicted with weight. But seriousness can become stifling, and sometimes playful is more sacred than solemn.

Gaudí designed the temple so that visitors would move through the Gospel story chronologically: birth, death, resurrection. After viewing the Nativity and passing through the interior, we arrive at the Passion facade. The Glory facade is unfinished—estimated completion in 2026, the centennial anniversary of Gaudí’s death—so our tour ends here, with death.

I stay in front of the Passion facade the longest. Compared with the Nativity, the Passion might belong to a different church—or not to a church at all. Tree-sized bones and ribs hold the facade in place. The sculptures are stark, all hard lines and angular faces. They are rendered with a crudeness that gives the impression of pure essence: the shame within Peter, the confusion in Pilate. In one sculpture, Jesus’ spine is a line of holes down his back.

I stand before the sculptures well after my audio tour ends, my eyes moving from face to sculpted face.

Taken as a whole, the Sagrada Familia is a bizarre mingling of aesthetics. It defies imagination and shakes us out of tidy stories. You may be offended or you may be moved, as countless critics and visitors have been in equal measure. About the temple, architecture critic Rowan Moore wrote, “It is not pretty, but that is not the point.” The Passion facade, certainly, is not pretty—it is, in a way, ugly. Especially after the lush depictions on the Nativity facade, and after the opulence of the inner temple, it jars you. It jarred me.

Art historian Katie Kresser has said, “One of the functions of art is to disrupt the calcification of faith.” I like this thought for a few reasons, but I especially like that she doesn’t say prevent the calcification of faith. Her verb choice—disrupt—assumes calcification is inevitable. What Kresser takes for granted is that we become numb to truth and beauty when it’s presented the same way again and again. One of art’s responsibilities is to make us vulnerable again, to subvert our callousness and make us porous enough to receive truth and beauty, the way poetry forces you to look at things from odd angles, to hear something familiar in a new cadence or imagine it sideways through metaphor.

In recent years, what’s permeated my heart the most has not been my church’s liturgy but poetry and visual art that touches the sacred, approaching faith in unfamiliar ways. Maybe it takes an artist’s perspective to evoke mystery from what has grown familiar. Perhaps it took a Gaudí to remind us of the strangeness of the virgin birth, the crucifixion, the resurrection.

Gaudí designed a church with a vision far exceeding his lifetime. He meant for the Sagrada Familia to outlive him, even in its creation process. In later years, as he became more devoted to his art and his God, Gaudí took to sleeping in his workshop in the temple’s basement. Facades lifted like wings as he dug himself deeper into his masterpiece. Today he lies buried in a tomb beneath his life’s vision. Each year, the towers rise around him.

Annelise Jolley
Writer & Editor

Annelise Jolley’s work has appeared in Brevity, The Millions, Hidden Compass & Sojourners

Photography by Elle Suko