Estudi i catàleg de l’art de l’època moderna a Andorra. Segles XVI-XVIII

Study and catalogue of the art of the modern period in Andorra. 16th-18th centuries

Funding Entity

Ministry of Culture of Andorra

Team: Dr. Joan Bosch; Dr. Francesc Miralpeix

Description

The catalogue Art of the modern period in Andorra. 16th-18th centuries is the result of agreements signed by the University of Girona, the Catalan Institute for Research in Cultural Heritage and the Ministry of Culture of Andorra in 2008 and 2013.

Art of the modern period in Andorra is a 21st century look at the artistic production of the 16th to 18th centuries that has been preserved in the Principality and that aspires to place it in the complex and varied cartography of European art. And it aims to be a demonstration that apparently modest and peripheral artistic episodes with respect to the avant-garde centers of the moment can also contain very rich and very interesting stories, and that the historian's task is to reveal them.

It is a book full of good stories, told in a very accessible way, which will be useful to both the novice reader who is approaching these topics for the first time and the more expert reader who is looking for the rigor of a great research work. The story of Miquel Ramells and Guiu Borgonyó stands out, the most brilliant moment of art in Andorra that begins when it is discovered that they were the painters that for decades all historiography had called the Master of Canillo and culminates when it is possible to explain a pictorial language that must be considered among the most attractive of the second third of the 16th century. Also fascinating is the narrative that proves that the art of the Andorran parishes benefited from the circulation of European Renaissance and Baroque graphic culture. Or the one that proposes to arrange the vast Andorran body of works of art in a stylistic sequence, accompanied by individual studies of the works and biographies of the most relevant authors who have been identified. Also very intense are the narratives that illuminate the personalities and trajectories of Antoni Tremulles, Isidre Clusa, Joan Casanoves or the one that explains the arrival in Sant Julià de Lòria of two paintings from the environment of Antoni Viladomat, the great Barcelona painter of the first half of the 18th century. And not only that: there is also a profound effort of reasoning dedicated to understanding the very elementary plastic methods of some craftsmen who seem to work outside of any stylistic code or to the analysis of the dense trajectory of the enigmatic “Master of Ansaloga”, who despite everything has not been able to free himself from anonymity.

The Art of the Modern Era in Andorra is a large book of more than four hundred pages, richly illustrated with magnificent photographs of the works where researchers from the University of Girona Joan Bosch and Francesc Miralpeix have conspired to understand the historical reality of that charming, parochial production. It is the happy result of ten years of research and, at the same time, of the complicity of its authors with the team of conservators and restorers of the Department of Cultural Heritage who had simultaneously launched a heritage operation of great value, restoring a substantial part of the works they were studying, trusting that they could contribute to the reconciliation of the current public with the heritage treasure of the Renaissance and Baroque era, which until recently was so unknown.

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