Gaudi: The Humble Catalan Genius Behind Barcelona’s Sacred Masterpiece
(REVIEW) On June 10, Pope Leo XIV visited Barcelona to celebrate Mass at the city’s — and perhaps the country’s — most famous landmark, the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia. The purpose of the visit was twofold: To bless the basilica’s recently completed Tower of Jesus Christ and commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of church’s visionary architect, Antoni Gaudi.
Pope Leo was the third pontiff to visit Sagrada Familia after John Paul II in 1982 and Benedict XVI in 2010. The multiple papal blessings were exceptional albeit posthumous honors for the distinctive building’s humble designer, a man so modest in dress and appearance that he was mistaken for a tramp when struck by a streetcar on June 7, 1926, dying a few days later in a pauper’s hospital.
Despite his humility, Gaudi was a proud defender of his culture (Catalan) and his deeply Catholic faith, both of which reflected his life’s work, meticulously examined in a probing new biography by British journalist Peter Stanford.
Stanford evenly blends the details of Gaudi’s life and his works, with an emphasis on the architect’s piety. If there is a flaw in the book “Gaudi: God’s Architect” it is, ironically, one of design. Instead of the standard 6-by-9-inch hardcover dimension, the book measures 5-by-7. This might make it handy to tote around Barcelona on a tour of Gaudi’s works (though it’s really not a guidebook). Yet it does a disservice to the book’s numerous full-color illustrations of Gaudi’s works, most of which are too small to fully appreciate.
Gaudi devotees are unlikely to find much new information here. Yet for those whose familiarity with the famed architect rests solely with his stunningly unique cathedral, this book offers the opportunity to explore the mind and soul of a truly modern saint.
Gaudi was born in 1852 in Reus (some sources say nearby Riudoms) in Catalunya, a staunchly autonomous region in northeastern Spain, just south of the Pyrenees, along the Mediterranean coast. Historically a rich, agricultural region, Catalunya was also home to artisans, such as ironworkers and coppersmiths, professions of Gaudi’s ancestors on both sides of his family.
Helping to craft intricate metalwork in his father’s workshop as a boy, Gaudi learned to manipulate raw material into intricate designs, a skill for which he ultimately became famous. From his mother he inherited a devotion to the church along with its rich traditions and architecture, Gothic examples of which littered the landscape of Catalunya, especially Barcelona where Gaudi went to study in his 20s at the city’s School of Architecture.
While not an especially good student (he ended up with more “fails” than passes on his transcript) Gaudi did not go unnoticed by the faculty, prompting the school’s director to famously remark, upon Gaudi’s graduation: “Today we have turned out an architect who will either be a madman or a genius.”
It didn’t take Gaudi long to establish himself as both.
His first major commission, Casa Vincens, was a spectacular private home built in a fashionable Barcelona suburb between 1883 and 1885 for industrialist Manuel Vincens i Montaner.
Romantic and colorful, the angular exterior of the mansion is awash in blue and white checkered tile work, including ceramic patterns of yellow zinnias on speckled, midnight-blue backgrounds. With its corbelled window openings and minaret-like towers, the building’s overall impression is that of an Orientalist fantasy, harkening back to the Moorish palaces and mosques of southern Spain’s Al Andalus region, a stronghold of Muslim power for seven centuries.
But Gaudi was also invoking a more contemporary style at Casa Vincens: Modernisme, the Catalan response to France’s flowery and imaginative Art Nouveau movement. He fused this aesthetic with his own nostalgic reinterpretations of traditional and colorful Catalan tilework together with what became his distinctive use of organic shapes. As one prominent Gaudi scholar observed, the groundbreaking architect understood that “in nature there is no straight line or plane, and that by contrast there is an immense variety of curved forms.”
This realization would would culminate in such famous Gaudi local landmarks as the Casa Batlló, with its flamboyant, fluid grillwork and curved balconies or the fantastical, dripping-sandcastle motif of Sagrada Familia’s soaring towers.
The success of Casa Vincens led to other lucrative commissions (Casa Batlló among them) from a burgeoning class of industrialists in and around Barcelona. Almost as an act of penance, Gaudi balanced this increased fame and wealth by humbly accepting commissions from ecclesiastical clients, such as the archdiocese of Barcelona (overseers of the Sagrada) or the congregation of Teresian nuns at Barcelona’s College of St. Teresa.
Inspired by the life and writings of the congregation’s patron saint, Teresa of Ávila, Gaudi honored her mystical philosophy by omitting handles on many of the doors in the convent, including its soaring front door with its distinctively Gaudian parabolic arch. The point of the omissions, as one of the nuns explained to Stanford, aligned with Saint Teresa’s belief that God is only found “from the inside. There are no doors you have to go through, and no handles you have to open.”
Like Teresa, Gaudi strove to balance his “inner and outer life” by ultimately living a fairly monastic life. In contrast to his over-the-top designs for houses and worship spaces, he himself lived in a bare, sparsely furnished room. A vegetarian, he subsisted primarily on modest meals and water (he rarely drank alcohol), fortifying himself throughout the day by nibbling on raisins, handfuls of which he kept in the pocket of his threadbare coat.
Though regarded as a living saint by his contemporaries, his Christian patience did occasionally run thin. Rather than altering his design for a private home to accommodate a piano for his wealthy client’s musician daughter, Gaudi acerbically suggested that she “take up the violin” instead.
He was just as stubbornly detailed-oriented when it came to his ecclesiastical commissions. Whenever a problem arose with the construction of the Sagrada, Gaudi would be the first, despite his advancing age and rheumatism, “to hurry out and up, scaling ladders and scaffolding … scurrying along parapets with the apparent lack of caution of a tightrope walker” in order to examine and remedy the situation himself.
Deep down he understood that when it came to this, his most monumental work, he was only its steward. Like the builders of the great medieval cathedrals, which often took centuries to complete, Gaudi was at peace with the fact that he would never live to see his vision fully realized. His client, as he often insisted, was God. “The architect does his work,” he once remarked. “It is Providence, in its highest designs, who carries the work forward.”
The final placement of a cross atop the Tower of Jesus Christ and Pope Leo’s blessing marked the completion of the magnificent cathedral (at 566 feet now the world’s tallest) though work on one façade will continue for at least another decade. Gaudi, meanwhile, was declared “venerable” by the late Pope Francis, an early step on the road to sainthood in the Catholic Church.
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist specializing in religion, culture, food, and history. His book, “Queens of Islam: The Muslim World’s Historic Women Rulers” was published by Interlink Books in 2025.