A fleeting three seconds. A man in a suit and boater hat, sporting a neatly trimmed white beard, crosses the frame. He advances, pauses momentarily, glances to the side, and disappears from view. Could this person, captured at a wedding in central Barcelona in 1922, be Antoni Gaudí?
That’s the question posed by art historian Beli Artigas on her blog, after recently receiving a family film reel that purportedly shows the architect in motion. “The descendants of the Costa-Artigas family contacted me recently following an article I published about the Costa house in Sitges and took the opportunity to tell me they had a film of their grandparents’ wedding in which Gaudí appears,” Artigas explains.
According to the heirs, their grandparents always maintained that the architect from Reus had attended the wedding, a story they are now attempting to reconcile with these images. In fact, the ties between Gaudí and the family were reportedly closer, as the design of the Gardens of Can Artigas in La Pobla de Lillet (Barcelona) has been attributed to the Catalan genius since the 1990s, as 2026 marks the centenary of his death.
“I simply proposed a game,” Artigas clarifies, having published the video on her blog alongside a brief overview of the family history to provide context. She did not intend to either affirm or deny that the figure was, in fact, Antoni Gaudí. Her intention in publishing was to try to find some document or photograph that would attest to the architect’s attendance at the wedding, which took place at the church of the Concepció in Barcelona on June 17, 1922.
To further the discovery and, perhaps, find other testimonies about the wedding that would support the theory of Gaudí’s presence, Artigas contacted Jan X. C., the architect behind the X Efemèrides d’Arquitectura account, which boasts over 42,000 followers.
In his thread, Jan X. C., less cautious than Artigas, compares the few frames with various photographs of the architect, traces lines outlining his nose and shoulders, and concludes that the man in the boater hat and white beard is Antoni Gaudí.
The Gaudí Chair’s Reservations
However, Galdric Santana, director of the Gaudí Chair, is far more reserved in his diagnosis. He acknowledges that a thorough scientific study would be needed to determine the hypothesis. “The Costa-Artigas family brought the video to the Chair just a month ago, and I told them it was a topic that interested me, but that I wouldn’t be able to get to it until later,” Santana comments, who is also the commissioner of the Gaudí Year.
The architect even recalls comparing the recording with the Gaudí death mask held by the Chair, and his intuition, at first glance, is that You’ll see arguments both for and against the figure being that of the architect, and that a study of at least one year would be required to reach a valid conclusion.
Santana’s prudence stems, beyond academic rigor, from the fact that the figure of Gaudí already attracts a number of falsely attributed photographs, and videos. In 2017, a video appeared supposedly showing the architect of the Sagrada Familia at a wedding in Montserrat in 1925. After pages of coverage in the press and a television report, experts on Gaudí concluded that the man could not possibly be the architect.
Another widely publicized case involved a photograph that came to light in 2016, which was supposed to show Antoni Gaudí entering the University of Barcelona. It was the same Galdric Santana who, after performing a metric reconstruction of the image, demonstrated that the man was nearly two meters tall, a height incompatible with Gaudí’s.
