Museu Nacional d Art de Catalunya

The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya or National Art Museum of Catalonia abbreviated as MNAC, is the national museum of Catalan visual art located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It was built for the 1929 World Exhibition and restored in 2005. It houses a vast collection of mostly Catalan art spanning the early Middle Ages to the early 20th century. And it shows a thousand years of Catalan art through its four permanent collections: Romanesque and Gothic art, Renaissance and Baroque art, Modern art, photography, drawings, prints and posters and the Catalan Numismatic Department and a gallery featuring work by Picasso. However, the high point of the museum is the Romanesque art section, considered the most important concentration of early medieval art in the world. This building has come to be one of the citys prime symbols of the regions separate, Catalan identity, but the fact that it was constructed under the centralist dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, lends a whiff of irony.

Romanesque and Gothic art : The collection of Romanesque murals is a unique patrimony both in terms of the quantity and the quality of the Romanesque paintings from church apses, reconstructed in situ.

Renaissance and Baroque art : The exhibitions of Renaissance and Baroque art include part of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection and feature works by major international painters such as El Greco, Zurbaran, Velazquez and Rubens.

Modern art, photography, drawings, prints and posters and the Catalan Numismatic Department : The museum's collection showcasing art from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, mainly comprising exhibitions of works by Catalan artists, covering all the artistic genres, including the Catalan Modernist style Art Nouveau movements of modernism and Noucentisme and the avant-garde.

A dedicated gallery featuring work by Picasso has opened, showcasing nine paintings which are representative of the painter's work.