A renewed perspective: Second presentation of works from the Casacuberta Marsans Collection.

The Hospital de St Saver begins a new chapter with a second presentation of works from the Casacuberta Marsans Collection.

This renewed selection, led by a work by El Greco recently added to the Collection, can be seen at the Hospital de St Saver. Selected for their singularity, the works engage in dialogue with one another and with the surrounding architecture, creating new narratives and ways of experiencing them.

Guided by the curatorial and mediation team, visitors will be able to discover the Casacuberta Marsans Collection, the conceptual and stylistic relationships between the works on display, as well as the history and architecture of the Hospital de St Saver, a protected building in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona.

This new presentation marks the first anniversary of the Hospital de St Saver, the exhibition space of the Casacuberta Marsans Collection which opened in November 2024. In line with the first selection of works presented then, the current display brings together a wide variety of territories and chronologies of Hispanic art through a contemporary perspective. The variety of works highlights the importance of artistic exchanges among the authors represented in the collection, revealing how artists and models from foreign territories converged with local art, and how native artists reinterpreted them through their own unique language.

Visitors will be able to see works by artists such as El Greco, Bartolomé Bermejo, Diego de la Cruz, Joaquim Mir, Santiago Rusiñol and Hermen Anglada-Camarasa, among many others.

El Greco and his first monumental Christ on the Cross lead the new selection of works on display

The Casacuberta Marsans Collection is pleased to present the addition of a work by El Greco, which leads this new presentation at the Hospital de St Saver.

This Christ on the Cross, measuring 178 × 104 cm and dated circa 1585–1590, is considered the earliest version among El Greco’s crucifixions. The closest iconographic precedent is Christ on the Cross with Two Donors (Paris, Musée du Louvre), originally for the Convent of the Queen in Toledo.

The first known reference of this painting dates from 1908, when Manuel B. Cossío published his well-known catalogue on the Cretan painter. He knew the work through the German art critic Meier-Graefe, who, years earlier, together with the jurist and educator José Castillejo (associated with the Institución Libre de Enseñanza), had visited the Sevillian palace of the 2nd Count of Águila, where the painting was located at the time. Meier-Graefe and Castillejo noted then:

“its owners have dusted off the Greco they kept in a dark corner of the chapel, and they still cannot understand how it could be of any value, with such a tiny head and such a very, very long body.”

The presentation of this work at the Hospital de St Saver brings the number of paintings by El Greco accessible to the public in the city of Barcelona to four. In the current display, El Greco’s dramatic Christ on the Cross is linked to the “España negra” painting tradition, as well as to Catalan Modernism, which embraced expression over realism by celebrating El Greco.

Christ on the Cross establishes multiple conceptual and stylistic relationships with works by José Gutiérrez Solana, Ignacio Zuloaga, Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas within the collection. These connections can currently be explored at the Hospital de St Saver.