AS THE 1890s progressed, “Don Anton”, as he was known by those who worked alongside him, became progressively less social. Perhaps the companionship of the workshop was sufficient for him. Also, he had no real need to network — as it would be called today — to find new clients. They came looking for him.
Something deeper, though, was afoot. As he immersed himself ever more in his quiet moments in spiritual books, he developed a devotion to his Egyptian namesake, Sant Antoni (Saint Anthony) and the Desert Fathers, third- and fourth-century hermits who renounced the world to embrace asceticism in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula.
Regarded by Christianity as the founders of monasticism, their lives of fasting and disdain for possessions in search of spiritual purity called out to Gaudí. Already a vegetarian, he now also forsook alcohol. Some aspects of his self-denial had a practical basis: he didn’t wear glasses because he believed (mistakenly) that it would weaken his eyes.
There was a profound and growing disinterest in food. He would rely on almonds (the same ones sold in the market at Reus in his youth), chard sticks dipped in milk, raw vegetables, honey spread on bread, and the occasional dried biscuit — Panes de Sant Antoni were a favourite — to keep him going during the day in the studio, all washed down with water.
AlamyPortrait of Antonio Gaudi by the Spanish illustrator Francisco Fonollosa
Present, too, was that punitive element, a desire to remove himself as far as possible from worldly temptation in the hope that it would bring him the closeness to God that he craved.
Like everyone, though, he had his weaknesses. Cigarettes proved hard to give up, but, in the 1890s, he managed, when he was joined in his efforts by Bishop Torras. Thereafter, he was intolerant of those who continued to smoke.
In the Sagrada Família workshop, those who asked permission to light up were turned down by Gaudí, who liked to recite the words of a favourite German Catholic priest, Sebastian Kneipp: “God did not give us a chimney for us to use it as a nose.”
Gaudí’s new attachment to Kneipp’s writing on diet as a way of attaining spiritual as well as physical health shows that he was on occasion as likely as anyone else to embrace new trends. Kneipp was a fashionable guru at the time, though today largely forgotten, and Gaudí’s enthusiasm was shared by many across Europe.
Kneipp’s retreat centre in Bad Wörishofen, near Munich, where bathing in the waters was believed to effect cures, was a popular place of pilgrimage, even attended by Pope Leo XIII.
OTHER aspects of Gaudí’s daily regime also drew increasingly heavily on Catholic traditions of longer standing. Lent is a time of fasting in preparation to mark Jesus’s death and resurrection. It is often a question of giving something up — sweets or chocolate for children, desserts or alcohol for adults — with any money saved as a result given to good causes.
In the 19th century, in Catholic countries, fasting often meant something more extreme and penitential, which appealed to Gaudí. As faith came to play a greater part in his life during this period, though, his zeal became unhinged. In 1894 he took Lenten fasting to such extremes that he effectively went on a hunger strike and all but starved himself to death.
Details of his plight somehow reached the city’s newspapers where it was reported, such was his renown. It placed in the public mind an image of him as a kind of self-flagellating monk who took his faith to extremes. Confined to bed in a flat on Carrer Diputació in L’Eixample, lethargic and skeletal as he kept warm under layer after layer of coats and blankets, Gaudí refused all efforts by his father, his alarmed friends and colleagues, and even his doctor friend, Père Santaló from the Catalan Excursion group, to persuade him to end his fast.
Did he really intend to kill himself? Catholicism then as now judges harshly those who resort to suicide. It would have led to him being denied a Catholic burial and heaven, something it is hard to imagine him risking.
Peter StanfordThe interior of Sagrada Familia
Yet at the same time, among the sometimes contradictory messages of Catholic tradition, there are a number of largely female saints in the Church’s history (Catherine of Siena, Margaret of Cortona, Veronica Giuliani and Magdalen de’ Pazzi, but not Teresa of Ávila) who either refused most food, or tried to feed themselves only on consecrated communion wafers, which Catholics believed not just to represent the body of Christ but actually to be it. Modern historians describe it as “holy anorexia”.
If that was Gaudí’s chosen direction of travel in seeking to emulate the self-lacerating asceticism of the Desert Fathers, then the pressure he had been putting himself under of late to become once again a “good Catholic” played its part. It took a firm talking to from Bishop Torras i Bages to shake him out of it.
The prelate was summoned and, reports have it, he warned his dear friend of the sin of spiritual pride in such a fanatical act of faith that denied God’s role in deciding when to end a life. It had been a close call and, though he recovered, Gaudí thereafter appeared to retain an appetite for taking whatever he was doing to the limit.
This is an extract from Gaudí: God’s architect by Peter Stanford, published on 4 June by Hodder & Stoughton at £30 (Church Times Bookshop £24); 978-1-3998-1181-1.