The Corpus Christi Procession Leaving the Church of Santa Maria Del Mar

A feast, not an episode

Corpus Christi is a festival of the church calendar, kept in early summer, whose central act is a procession carrying the sacrament through the streets. It is not a scene from the life of Christ. Five titles in this catalogue contain the phrase, and none of them is a narrative panel; they are pictures of an observance, several centuries downstream of the events the cycle records.

What the subject actually is

A city street at a particular hour, with a crowd leaving a named church. The record files the work under landscape and city, not under religion, which is the correct reading: the sacred content is the occasion for the scene rather than its subject. Late nineteenth-century painting in Barcelona took up exactly this kind of material, the modern city observed on a day when it behaves differently.

The catalogue entry

The record names Ramon Casas, dates the canvas to 1898, and places it in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), Barcelona, Spain. It measures 115.5 x 196 cm, a wide horizontal suited to a street seen along its length. Two styles are entered, Art Nouveau Modern and Impressionism, and the artist is recorded as Spanish. The measured palette reads as neutral. The record says nothing about a commission or an exhibition, and none is claimed.