Robert Hughes takes a look at the cultural heritage of Barcelona through the prism of a forthcoming exhibit at the Met. There’s more to Barcelona than Gaudi, although he towers above the rest, naturally enough. Some things I didn’t know:

In the latter years of his life, when making the figures for the Nativity facade of the Sagrada Familia, he made literal transcriptions from nature, by chloroforming birds and even a donkey in order to cast them in plaster. Sometimes this effigy-making was of a rather gruesome kind; in order to make infants for his scene of the Slaughter of the Innocents, he got permission from the Hospital of the Holy Cross on the Ramblas to cast the corpses of stillborn babies in plaster; live ones could not be used since they could not be prevented from moving. There exists an old photo of the inside of one of Gaudí’s studios, looking like a charnel-house, with plaster bodies and limbs hanging on every wall. But what mattered most to him were the forms and structural principles that could be deduced from inanimate matter, plants and rock-forms especially.