Josep Maria Rovira-Brull: Coca de Mataró
The Mataró Coca. This is the name of one of the oldest ships in Europe, built in the Middle Ages and preserved in the Maritime Museum Prins Hendrik in Rotterdam. This ex-voto (offering to the gods) was built in 1450. It came from the hermitage of Sant Simó, in the Maresme region, but it is now believed that it may have originated from a small maritime shrine in Calella. The circumstances that led to its arrival on the US art market are unknown. It was auctioned there in 1929 and acquired by a German antique dealer who passed it on to a Dutch millionaire who, finally, placed it on loan to the museum where it is currently housed.
This votive offering represents, more specifically, a medieval merchant ship identified as a "coke" of the North Sea, a type of vessel used for transporting goods and troops by the English and Normans from the 12th to the early 14th centuries. The ship had a crew of between one hundred and one hundred and fifty men. Its rigging was square, and it is estimated to have had a single mast. All of this is perfectly represented in the Mataró Coke, whose meticulous construction and exquisite beauty illustrate what Mediterranean ships, the predecessors of those of the Age of Discovery, were like.
It was Josep Maria Rovira- Brull who, in the 1980s, after the archaeological study carried out on the ex-voto to confirm its origin, commemorated such an important object for nautical history in a series of lithographs entitled ' Coca 15th century'. Rovira-Brull thus captured in this lithograph the typical characteristics of his work: namely, a crazy and delirious surrealism, a high social content that often borders on satire, and an impeccable technique that make the brilliant artist from Mataró an artist who deserves his place among the great surrealists of the last century.
