Valladolid (Spain), Feb. 15. The monks of the Cartuja de Miraflores, near the Spanish city of Burgos (north), asked the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to return to Santiago el Mayor, a precious alabaster sculpture carved by Gil de Siloé for the royal pantheon of Juan II and Isabel of Portugal, the parents of Isabel la Católica and located in front of the altar of the church.
The petition, processed in 2022 through the Spanish Embassy in the United States, does not involve any legal claim, but is rather friendly to obtain the return of a masterpiece of Gothic sculpture ( 15th century) from Spain, whence he came fraudulently.
Ricardo Romaniega, spokesman for the Carthusian monks, explained it on Wednesday to EFE, a contemplative order founded in the 11th century and characterized, among other things, by the vow of silence, installed in the surroundings of Burgos after the transfer, by the king Juan II, of a hunting lodge to consecrate the monastery.
“We started the process a year ago, and the embassy spoke directly with the Metropolitan”, a museum that since the late 1970s has kept the statue of Santiago the Greater in The cloisters, the section dedicated to the medieval art, an institution that has been for almost twenty years, he sent a replica of it to the Charterhouse of Miraflores.
This was after the complete restoration of the alabaster funeral complex, undertaken in 2006 by the Spanish Historical Heritage Foundation, and which included several apostles, including Santiago el Mayor, sculpted as a pilgrim and who stood at the head of the tomb. , in front of the sculpture of Isabel of Portugal.
The empty spaces of other sculptures also disappeared were occupied, “to hide them”, by other pieces that did not correspond to the real Pantheon, as the restorers verified in 2006 by comparing what they had found at the beginning works with various images of the same photographed at the beginning of the 20th century by a photojournalist of the “Diario de Burgos”.
Responsible for these changes was José María de Palacio y Abárzuza, Count of Las Almenas, “an engineer and famous collector of works of art in Madrid who brought together during the first third of the 20th century with good taste and criteria”, explained to EFE the professor and art historian María José Martínez Ruiz (University of Valladolid), author of several studies on the character.
Approved by the Archbishop of Burgos, he says, he arrived at the Charterhouse of Miraflores in 1915 to offer his services as a specialist and restorer of the funerary monument and other artistic elements, the result of the devastation suffered by the troops Napoleonic. .first, then by the dispossession of the confiscations of the liberal governments of the 19th century.
“The fact is that he made very free interventions in the tomb and in other dependencies, where he arrived with the permission of the Archbishop of Burgos, and he had a certain freedom to act with practices “somewhat strange. He took pieces to Madrid with the pretext to restore them better, which in some cases did not come back, and he hid the holes he left with others,” he said. -he adds.
With this strategy he came to assemble an extraordinary collection of art which he deposited in the Palacio del Pico, which he ordered to be built in the Madrid town of Torrelodones at the beginning of the last century, including rooms and artistic elements that he obtained with tricks.
This palace, where filmmaker Carlos Saura filmed “The Hundred Years of Mom” in 1978, belonged to dictator Francisco Franco and today the site is practically abandoned.
The Count of the Ramparts, added the art historian, sold his collection at auction in 1927 through the intermediary of the Hispanic couple formed by the architect Arthur Byne and his wife, Mildred Stapley, sent to Spain by the Hispanic Society of New York in the 1920s, as correspondent members, “but who soon became dealers”.
“Santiago le Majeur was included in the collection. It was auctioned off at the American Art Association and was a big event at the time, as it was rare for such precious and exquisite pieces to come out,” added Martínez Ruiz, who clarified that the piece passed to a private collector before arriving, around 1969, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which also preserves the monumental original grille of the Cathedral of Valladolid.EFE
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