The spectacular painted  music room ceiling of the Palau March, Palma, by José María Sert.

Sert's mural above the side door of the music room, showing some performers carrying a crystal ball

A view of the music room and the exuberant gold curtains which Sert draped the room with.

A view of the ceiling painting over the monumental stair in the Palau March

The allegorical group representing Beauty. A smiling Aphrodite sits enthroned upon a great shell boat.

The allegorical group representing Strength. This figure is one of the most expressionistic Sert painted.

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When Spain’s richest man decided to decorate his Palma palace, muralist José María Sert was the man for the job. World-famous, he captured as no other the refined elegance and taste for the exotic of the 1920s and 1930s and his exuberant wall and ceiling paintings recall the great Venetian masters.

The room is a joy, a place of unrestrained dizzying joy. The ceiling is a wide-open sky, where a riot of energetic acrobats and radically foreshortened performers swing from trapezes and each other as they’re carried up, up and away and out of sight by a preposterous fleet of hot-air balloons.

As the eyes become accustomed to the dark, gold light, they are soon drawn down from the uplifting scenes to the surrounding walls. It takes a second or two to realise that the rich curtains are not real, but part of an outrageous mural. They are drawn open, literally so, above each door and window, transforming each of these spaces into a stage.

The painted acrobats jump through hoops and leap through the air, bands strike up a tune, circus performers clamber up steps and wave from balconies–it’s as if Goya has gone to Mardi Gras by way of the Moulin Rouge.

Such extravagance doesn’t come cheap of course. But the man who commissioned this music room for his Palma de Mallorca palace in 1944 was Joan March, one of the richest men in the world, and he could afford the best that money could buy. Indeed, he could afford the greatest muralist of the day, José María Sert.

The music room at the March family palace in Palma was the last great private commission Sert was ever to undertake; he died the following year, even as he looked around Mallorca for a house where he could retire. His sparkling career, which had spanned five decades and three continents and culminated in the dazzling music room, had started almost half a century before when the young Sert tore open a letter from his friend, the Bishop of Vic.

“You asked me for a chapel,” wrote the bishop, “and I offer you a cathedral.” Barcelona-born Sert was just 26 when he received his first major commission–to decorate the walls of the enormous cathedral of Vic, an ancient city north of Barcelona. Though he got to work straight away, he was to take another 30 years to complete it. As his fame spread, he became distracted by increasingly lucrative offers from wealthy clients, including Princesses in Paris, Lords in London and Marquesses in Madrid. And he enjoyed a never-ending social whirl where he mixed with the most glamourous names of his day, his glittering circle embracing artists, musicians and writers such as Proust, Gide, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Stravinsky and de Falla. He married the brilliant Misia Godebska, gifted pianist, socialite, muse and host of the most celebrated literary-artistic salon in Paris. And he left her for Roussy Mdivani, one of the five celebrated siblings known as the "Marrying Mdivanis": all managed to marry into wealth and fame after fleeing the Russian Revolution and reinventing themselves as princes and princesses. Through marriage, Sert soon found himself related to an Astor, Barbara Hutton,  oil heiress Virginia Sinclair, a son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and screen sirens Mae Murray and Pola Negri.

His exhilarating, extravagant murals and spectacularly painted ceilings, which drew comparisons with Venetian master Tiepolo, exploded into life with casts of thousands that not even Cecil B DeMille could muster. Musicians, acrobats, folk dancers, Mandarins and Blackamoors, fabulous beasts, saints and sinners, even Sinbad and his sailors, were joined by parades of trumpeting elephants and fleets of camels against gilt backgrounds that lent silver-screen glamour and grandeur to Europe and America’s most elegant reception rooms.

He covered the walls of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York with ribald Goyesque scenes, turned art collector and politician Sir Philip Sassoon’s ballroom in London’s Park Lane into a desert oasis, adorned a ceiling in Palm Beach and a Rothschild chateau. His mural at Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center replaced that of Mexican artist Diego de Rivera, who was famously dismissed for having included a portrait of Lenin. “It is a great triumph. Not just for me but for Europe. I have surpassed Rivera,” Sert boasted.

But it wasn’t all lightness and fun with Sert: he portrayed the drama of war at the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva, and while his friend, painter and critic Miguel Utrillo, loved the elegant, flawless, exuberant joy of his pictorial panoramas he was more deeply impressed by the apocalyptic baroque majesty of the Cathedral of Vic, which the artist finally completed in 1930 only to see it utterly destroyed six years later at the outbreak of the Civil War. Sert spent his last days working on the restoration.

Sert was born into a wealthy Barcelona textile family in 1874 and though his brothers devoted themselves to the family business, José María decided to study drawing and painting. He was soon associating with Gaudí, and befriending painters Ramón Casas and Santiago Rusiñol. When his father died, he decided to go where every aspiring artist went: to the cultural capital of the world and the ultimate arbiter of taste–Paris.

But when Sert arrived in France in 1899 he was hardly the struggling fin-de-siècle, absinthe-swilling painter. Thanks to a sizeable inheritance, he had soon set himself up in a magnificent house where he installed his studio and discovered where his talent lay. In his first year he designed an opulent Bacchanalian mural for La Maison de l'Art Nouveau, the influential gallery that gave the turn-of-the-century art movement its name. His work was widely acclaimed when exhibited at the 1900 World Exhibition/Exposition Universelle in Paris, and from then on, Sert was to concentrate on developing his skill as a muralist.

“Sert was a decorative painter. And he never aspired to be anything else,” wrote his biographer Alberto del Castillo in 1947. “What’s more he grew tired of having to remind people that he was, first and foremost, a decorator.”

Sert painted all his murals on canvas at his Paris workshop and would transport them to their destination where they could be hung on frames or stuck directly on the walls using adhesives. When accepting a commission, Sert would always personally visit the room to be decorated and he insisted that the finished mural be placed nowhere else.

In his workshop he posed models and mannequins in different compositions and photographed them, and later studied the effects of light. The canvas was prepared with a layer of gold or silver leaf and his team of artists would begin painting the required figures. Sert would oversee the work and always took over himself towards the end of the process in order to finish the mural. As he worked with such enormous canvasses, his workshop was equipped with an elevator, enabling his team to paint the upper reaches. He also employed a complex and sophisticated system of mirrors which allowed him to see what the finished mural was going to look like from a distance. This was vital to get the foreshortening just right, as many of his works were destined to adorn very high ceilings, as was the case at the cathedral.

In January 1900, Sert asked his friend, the Bishop of Vic, to find him a small chapel in the diocese where he might be able to paint his largest mural to date. It was then that the bishop offered him the vast, stark interior of the neoclassical cathedral.

Over the next three decades, the church authorities and pious burghers were to despair of ever seeing the project completed, and the bishop, who never lost faith in his protégé, died long before the work was unveiled.

Mallorcan financier Joan March, then Spain’s richest man, was more persuasive when he wanted things done, paying Sert the enormous sum of 1,000,000 pesetas up front, in cash in a suitcase, with another 500,000 to come on completion of a series of murals for his new Palma palace.

March was a self-made millionaire and was keen to provide his dynasty with a place to call home. In 1939 he asked architect Luis Gutiérrez to design an enormous Renaissance-style palace in the centre of Palma, next to the Almudaina royal palace, near the Cathedral and beside the Círculo Mallorquín, the club where Palma society met. He asked Sert to decorate the stairway and the music room.

Sert designed four striking, sculpture-like, allegorical groups for above the stairs. Painted in gold against a deep, ink-blue background they symbolise Beauty, Strength, the Arts and Science.

In Beauty, a smiling Aphrodite sits enthroned upon a great shell boat, while a winged woman descends from the heavens, an apple in one hand, the other outstretched to help a man board the celestial vessel. Other men stand to one side, despairing at being unable to join her. In Strength, a single furious wave scoops up a fragile boat, where the lone, naked rower struggles against its force with titanic effort. In the foreground, the book of History lies open. The Arts features a friar-like figure sitting on a shell, an open book on his knees. An explosion of light radiates from his head as three figures swoop down from on high to inspire him. Naked figures representing the masses eager for inspiration kneel at the learned man’s feet. Science is more baroque, and shows a tormented thinker being inspired by experience, represented by the figure of Chronos, and receiving a visit from a spirit bearing a compass and telescope.

When it came to decorating the music room, Sert was also inspired. Here was a rectangular room with six openings; three windows and three doors. With much of the wall space thus lost, Sert decided to draw the eye to the spaces above the doors and windows. And here he put on quite a show, transforming the room into a giant, striped circus tent.

Having finished the murals, Sert decided to settle in Mallorca. But his health was fading fast and he still had to attend to the placing of the final murals at the cathedral. His second wife Roussy had died in 1938 and now his first, his devoted Misia, was once again by his side.

On November 15, 1945 a Te Deum was sung as the restored Cathedral of Vic, with Sert’s spectacular murals once again in place, was inaugurated. Just 12 days later he was dead. He was buried in the Cathedral, surrounded by the murals that had made his name and which he had dedicated his life to completing.

Sir Philip Sassoon's Park Lane Ballroom is now at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, where you can also see his Catalan history cycle inside the City Hall. The Cathedral of Vic is also well worth visiting
When:	Nov-Mar: 10am – 6pm. Apr-Oct: 10am-6.30pm. Sat: 10am-2pm. Sun closed
Where:	The Sert murals can be admired at the Palau March in central Palma. Palau Reial 18
Phone:	971 711 122
Price:	€3.60
Web:	http://www.fundbmar.es	Where