Too Much of a Good Thing

The actress Mae West once said, “Too much of a good thing is—WONDERFUL!” That’s the way I feel when I walk inside a Spanish church.

People often confuse “The Cathedral” with the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, the notoriously ugly building designed by Antony Gaudí. Last week workers finally put the cross on top. It still is not finished, though.

In contrast to Gaudí’s basilica, however, workers began building this cathedral in 1390, did not get to building the roof for another hundred years, and it is not completely finished yet. I have rarely seen such a collection of chapels, altars, shrines, tombs and sarcophogi—each one adorned as though every angel in heaven’s host was about to die next week, and the artists felt every one must be preserved in marble and gold.

The ornamentation in this church may be excessive, but even so, it is remarkable. Every inch of this enormous building is gilded, carved and decorated with the most exquisitely beautiful iconography a human mind can produce. The mind goes numb. It cannot absorb it all. And it is all so OLD. So very OLD. Once vivid painted sculptures bear the haze of centuries of incense smoke. The figures of the crucifixion in this church reach almost half way back to the time when the Son of God walked on earth.

So to clear our minds we decided to take the elevator up to the roof’s steeples and lanterns, where we got a fantastic overview of this city. Neighboring buildings almost as old as this one surround us. Barcelona throws nothing away. A palace old in Columbus’s time now houses the city water department’s offices. This city’s age, its decor and its richness are all examples of incomprehensible excess, and it is all glorious.Read more