Ark of the Covenant between Chicago and Barcelona's Sant Just quarter
Joan Molet Petit, professor in the department of History of Art in the University of Barcelona, went to the Chicago Art Institute at the beginning of this academic year— in order to study the personal files of the Catalan architect Josep Vilaseca, the author of Arc de Triomf in Barcelona. The files are in this American institute. Joan Molet came back to Barcelona with the architectʼs work: more than 500 photographs of documents and drawings. He later read a piece of news which stated that a replica of the Ark of the Covenant had been found in a forgotten chapel in Sant Just quarter. It was in the church Sants Màrtirs Just i Pastor- and after months of uncertainty, it seemed that it was a work by Vilaseca. Professor Molet realized one of the drawings he saw in Chicago was the scheme of this work- his research was useful to prove who the author of this piece of work was.
Joan Molet Petit, professor in the department of History of Art in the University of Barcelona, went to the Chicago Art Institute at the beginning of this academic year— in order to study the personal files of the Catalan architect Josep Vilaseca, the author of Arc de Triomf in Barcelona. The files are in this American institute. Joan Molet came back to Barcelona with the architectʼs work: more than 500 photographs of documents and drawings. He later read a piece of news which stated that a replica of the Ark of the Covenant had been found in a forgotten chapel in Sant Just quarter. It was in the church Sants Màrtirs Just i Pastor- and after months of uncertainty, it seemed that it was a work by Vilaseca. Professor Molet realized one of the drawings he saw in Chicago was the scheme of this work- his research was useful to prove who the author of this piece of work was.
“At first, when I saw the picture, I thought about the possibility of it being a pantheon, a kind of work that Vilaseca did years later with Batllóʼs grave”, says Molet, who is currently working on the identification of a hundred drawings in Chicago. In this case, the findings in Sant Just have enabled him to see the nature and aim of its drawing. It is an ornamental work for the churchʼs altar -which was exposed during Easter, as a tradition during the second half of the 19th Century. Molet says that even though this was an early work for the architect Vilaseca it already shows some of the authorʼs traits, such as the Egyptian inspired details: “all the Egyptian aesthetic is something very typical of him and he applied it to some buildings, but in this case itʼs nothing far from what is produced”-referring to the Arkʼs content, the ten commandments which God gave to Moses when the Jewish ran from Egypt.
The architect and master builder Josep Vilaseca (1848-1910), known basically for his work of Arc de Triomf in Barcelona for the universal exhibition in 1888, is also the author of other works such as Bruno Cuadros house, known as the Casa dels Paraigües (the Umbrella house), and the pantheon for the Batlló family in Montjuïcʼs cemetery.