Sacreda Familia

Yesterday we got to Sacreda Familia (Holy Family) rather late, so didn’t go in. It’s Barcelona’s Cathedral, and is still being finished - after more than a hundred years! This isn’t for want of trying - there may have been some patches of inactivity since it was begun in the 1880s, such as during the Spanish Civil War (when the Cathedral was damaged) but in general it’s been on the go since day one.
It was the dream of a Barcelona bookseller, but I don’t suppose he ever dreamt he’d get what is now in existence. The first architect got as far as building the crypt area, which is substantial in itself, and now houses a museum to the second architect, Gaudi, who between other projects made it his life’s work to design the most remarkable cathedral in Christendom. He sometimes lived in the Cathedral; he had his workshop there at times, and he’s buried there. He’s so honoured that I’m sure most Barcelonians know his name. And he deserves all the honour heaped on him. Somehow he managed to create a monument to God, to Christ (and Mary) and to creation that is so strange and so remarkable that at first you just don’t know what to make of it.
Our first view of it, from across the street, made us wonder what the heck the place actually was. Because it’s still being built, there are cranes everywhere, and scaffolding. Several of the twenty odd towers that will eventually exist are there, and some of them have been there for more than a century. But your first impression of the building is of towers that are full of strange holes, and of a surface that’s so decorated you can’t grasp anything.
Fortunately, when you get up close you realise what’s going on. The way the surface seems to be sliding off itself, like icing melting on a cake, isn’t the case at all: the surface is covered with natural things such as plants and animals. Sculptured vines and creepers cover the building; there are dozens of sculptures of animals and people: stories from the Bible, and liturgical symbols. Each spire has a different top, and nothing is repeated anywhere. At present the tallest tower is 120 metres; in due course the one that focuses on Christ will be 170 metres, making the Cathedral not only the tallest building in Barcelona, but also the tallest church in the world.
Gaudi said: to be original go back to the Origin. And he has done. He continually studied plants and animals to see how things were structured, and used the designs in his buildings. (Not just the Cathedral but also all of his other architectural pursuits.) This created enormous problems for his sculptors, his engineers, his stonemasons, and everyone else connected with the building. But so loyal were they to Gaudi, and to his vision, that they overcome the problems again and again. Gaudi himself made intricate models of the most difficult parts of the structure, and many of these are on display in the museum in the crypt. Unfortunately most of his drawings and plans were destroyed in the Civil War, but subsequent architects and others have worked hard to discover exactly what he intended and to make sure his intentions are carried out.
The inside of the cathedral is at present full of scaffolding, but some areas are complete. In due course all the windows will have stained glass in them, but for now only two of these are finished, and they are both kaleidoscopes of colour. The inner columns weave up to the ceiling area like great plant stalks. None of them are simply round: they have been built so that they almost spiral upwards. In the ceiling itself, the stone is shaped like flowers and leaves, and these hang out over the columns. The balcony, which is high above the floor, and goes along both sides of the building, will hold 1200 to 1500 singers one day - when the place is complete. It’s shaped in a great wave, weaving in and out. The staircases are spiral, and you can already climb far up to the top of what’s completed - or take a lift. Celia reckoned Health and Safety would have something to say about thousands of tourists coming into a building site - which is what it is. Most of the floor is covered with moulds, and great pieces of stone, and building materials.
Outside what is currently the front entrance, are some of Gaudi’s famous leaning columns. These start out some distance from the wall, and fall back onto it, as it were. And over the doors are sculptures of the fourteen stations of the Cross. They’re not in the usual order - Christ naked on the cross is at the centre - but they wonderfully vivid, and striking.
As you can see, the place made quite an impression on us. And then we got a bus to Parc Guell, which was originally intended to be a place where sixty of Gaudi’s designed houses would be built. In the end only two (and a gatehouse) were finished. It’s now been turned into a park for the public, and has more of his almost outrageous designs scattered about. Perhaps more on those in the next post.

Rochester and Braintree

Our trip back from Rochester took all day, but that was okay as we were just wanting to meander. We’d stayed at a Youth Hostel at Gillingham overnight - it was fine, a bit expensive, I thought, and very noisy (not helped by a baby who woke up several times during the night screaming, Mummy!)
We began our meandering by going back into Rochester again. Just a few hundred yards away from where we’d had the party the day before (at the Quaker Hall) we went into Rochester Cathedral. It’s a smaller Cathedral than Norwich, for example, but it has a more welcoming feel as a result. Not only that there was a choir there practicing for Matins, which was at 9.45. So we sat listening to the wonderful music in excellent acoustics, and then joined in Matins by sitting in the choir stalls themselves, just a few feet along from the singers. Apparently they were an ad hoc group. Celia had met one of them the night before at the Hostel, and she told us that they used to sing together in Southampton years ago, but because they’d all gone their various ways they only got together like this once a year or so, and this year they were spending a week singing in Rochester. Fortunately for us!
The cathedral also had an exhibition by Robert Koening in situ. It consists of a large group of figures all carved from lime trees - the trees had all grown in the area near where his family had come from, in Poland. The twenty or thirty figures, men and women, stand all facing one way with pain and hope on their faces. Their clothing is painting in simple colours, though the bumps and bruises caused by the sculpture’s travelling around Europe and England have knocked some of the colour away. There were four other smaller figures, done in greater detail.
We then went on to have a brief look at the Castle, which is literally just across the road. We didn’t go inside the building itself, as it cost more than we felt was justified at the moment, but the castle is still fairly intact given its age.
Set our Sat Nav to go and find the couple who had held the party the day before, to see them once more before we go. They have a house that by NZ standards is very narrow - one room across, and three deep, with presumably a similar arrangement upstairs - and it’s set in a street of similar houses. Still, its value has more than doubled since they bought it, so that’s a plus.
Onto Braintree, where Celia’s niece and her family live. She was surprised we found the place so easily, but Malvina had taken us there fairly straightforwardly. She was in the middle of finishing of an assignment for some higher degree she’s doing, so we didn’t stay too long. We may go back there when we head off to Luxembourg next month. (We’d had a bit of a panic about our possible European travels, wondering whether we needed visas or not, but after some calls today found that any places we’re likely to go to we don’t need them.

Felbrigg Hall

Today we went to Felbrigg Hall, and its walled garden. The latter is a delight, with pear and apricot trees and other such fixed to the inside walls, so that all the fruit hangs readily available. The herb garden runs almost the entire length of one side of the garden, and there is a dovecote at the very back. Flowers of every kind mingle together in an orderly fashion - flowers I’ve never come across in some cases. And the vegetable garden, which was large and varied, was so tidy that veges would have no choice but to grow well. In one of the glasshouses the smell of honeysuckle was overwhelming. Altogether a great find, and one of the many places we should try and get back to, since it’s only a couple of miles away from where we’re staying at present.

The house itself is rather undistinguished from the outside, in the sense that it’s very square at the front, and the older part doesn’t seem to quite meld with the newer section. Be that as it may, inside it’s well worth visiting, as all these places have been. Paintings galore - I mean paintings on almost every available surface. This is typical of all these houses: dozens of ancestors stare down at you, and in Felbrigg’s case they’re joined by a lot of landscapes, far more than I remember coming across elsewhere, and many naval battles. Then there are all the busts, and a marvellous collection of bronze statues of heroic gods and picaresque scenes, such as a stag being held by three or four people, or a thoroughly weary stag almost lying on top of his beaten rival.

I meant to mention that on the outside of Felbrigg’s entrance, high up on the third floor, are the words Gloria Deo in Excelsis (Glory to God in the highest) carved out in letters large enough to read easily from some distance.

The library is so full there’s a second room with books - perhaps a reading room - and then there’s a little alcove off that again, sunny and uncluttered, where someone could sit and read, or contemplate. There are a lot more modern books in this library than we’ve seen in other libraries too - modern in the sense that they may have actually been published in the 20th century. One of the Walpoles was obviously a favourite of some inhabitant of the house, as possibly all of his published works are there. (Having said that, I thought at first it was Hugh Walpole, who, incidentally, was born in NZ. However, it may have been Horace Walpole, who was an 18th century author.)

There’s also a headless lady from around 300 AD - she sits in a rather lonely fashion amongst all the stuffed birds in a kind of museum area. Not a very dignified place for such an elderly person, I would have thought.

One of the plastered ceilings consists of large ‘drops’ - I don’t know the technical name for them; they’re rather like huge upside-down chess pawns. Another one is ornate in an almost rococo style.

It’s very hard to convey any sense of these places. They’re so full of magnificent works and of wonderful design that you walk through them, mouth open, but not entirely taking it all in. A second and third visit might begin to help you become familiar with the place and its treasures. But there are so many houses around the country, and so much treasure in them, it’s unlikely we’ll get to see any of them more than once.

Ickworth House

We found our way to Ickworth House today. Turns out to be only about ten minutes from where we’re staying. It’s not as old as the other two National Trust homes we’ve been to, and it’s larger and more imposing than either of them. An enormous rotunda (see picture) is the centrepiece of the building, with east and west wings extending from it. The interior of the rotunda is about all that’s available to view; the west wing contains a large restaurant, foyer and the obligatory shop while the east wing has been formed into a hotel.
Ickworth must be one of the NT’s showpieces. Certainly a large amount of money has gone into keeping it up to scratch, aided by the fact that the family who owned it put plenty of solid money into it over various generations.
The house and gardens (some 1800 acres of them!) have been in the Hervey family since the mid-fifteenth century, but Ickworth House was only begun in 1795. It was the creation of a rather eccentric member of the Hervey family: Frederick, the 4th Earl of Bristol and also the Bishop of Derry, neither places being remotely near Ickworth, as far as I know. Frederick can’t have had a lot of time to be a Bishop, as he spent much of his life collecting things for his house – mostly abroad in Europe. Consequently, the house has a host of marvellous silverware, gold plate, various statues and busts, an intriguing collection of metal fish thingees - I can’t remember their purpose – around thirty miniatures, stuff from the Orient, and umpteen paintings, mostly portraits. Included amongst these are works by Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, Poussin, Velasquez and Titian. (I think there are actually only one each of the latter two artists, but the Titian is a superb portrait, the head shining out of a dark background.)
Besides all this, the design of the house is breathtaking. You walk into the Rotunda and there’s a large foyer, with a ceiling reaching up some thirty feet. When I say ceiling, I actually mean a glass roof, a curved glass roof. (One person there today was observantly asking: were the panes of glass actually curved, or just the shape of the roof as a whole?). Beyond this glass ceiling the building goes up further, and by stretching your neck you can see a metal spiral staircase clinging to the side of the upper storeys, and more storeys above that again. As Celia said, you wouldn’t want to drop anything while you were up there.
Everything in every room smacks of wealth, and beauty, and good taste. The walls are covered in portraits, many of them nearly life size. I think there are over 200 portraits around the place. But the furniture and fittings and adornments are all top of their class. (Only one pair of ornaments, candleholders in the form of a couple of very pink cherubs, seemed kitsch rather than classy.)
There are around 7,000 books in the various shelves and the library. Many of them were rebound at the beginning of the 19th century to make sure they stayed whole. Apparently most have been read at some point, as there are pencil notes scattered throughout. (Those people who will insist on annotating their own books!)
The house and gardens were given to the National in 1956 in lieu of death duties. The east wing was supposed to stay in the hands of the family, but the rather notorious 7th Marquess of Bristol sold it to the NT in 1998. He had managed to blow a £30 million pound fortune away in his short life – he died at 44, possibly from AIDs and definitely after having been involved in the drug scene. The next Marquess in line tried to buy the east wing back, but the NT refused. However, they did complete the unfinished west wing, in partnership with Sodexho Prestige.