Valladolid, (EFE).- The monks of the Cartuja de Miraflores have asked the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to return Santiago El Mayor, a valuable alabaster sculpture carved by Gil de Siloé for the royal pantheon of Juan II and Isabel of Portugal, located in front of the altar of the church, near Burgos.
The petition, processed during 2022 through the Spanish embassy in the United States, does not involve any judicial claim but is rather friendly, a kind of dialogue to achieve the return to the Miraflores Charterhouse of a masterpiece of Spanish Gothic sculpture (15th century), from which it came fraudulently.
Ricardo Romaniega, spokesman for the Carthusian monks, a contemplative order founded in the 11th century and characterized, among others, by the vow of silence, explained it to EFE this Wednesday, settled in the vicinity of Burgos after the cession, by the king Juan II, of a hunting lodge to consecrate the monastery.
Medieval art section
“We started the process a year ago and the embassy spoke directly with the Metropolitan”, a museum that since the late sixties has kept the statue of Santiago El Mayor in “The cloisters”, the section dedicated to medieval art, an institution that has been around for almost twenty years. He sent a replica of it to the Miraflores Charterhouse.
It was after the comprehensive restoration of the alabaster funerary complex – undertaken in 2006 by the Spanish Historical Heritage Foundation – of which several apostles were a part, one of them Santiago El Mayor, carved as a pilgrim and who was located at the head of the tomb, in front of the sculpture of Isabel of Portugal, mother of Isabel la Católica.
The empty spaces of other sculptures that also disappeared were occupied, “to hide them”, by other pieces that did not correspond to the royal pantheon, as the restorers verified in 2006 when they compared what they found at the beginning of the work with various images of the same signed at the beginning of the 20th century by Vadillo, a photojournalist for the Diario de Burgos.
The person responsible for everything was José María de Palacio y Abárzuza, Count of Las Almenas, “an engineer and famous collector of works of art in Madrid who gathered during the first third of the 20th century with good taste and criteria”, has exposed to EFE the full professor and art historian María José Martínez Ruiz (University of Valladolid), author of several studies on the character.
In the Cartuja de Miraflores since 1915
Endorsed by the Archbishop of Burgos, he said, he arrived at the Miraflores Charterhouse in 1915 to offer his services as a specialist and restorer of the funerary monument and other artistic elements, the result of the devastation to which the monastery was subjected by Napoleonic troops. first, and later by the dispossession of the confiscations of the liberal governments of the XIX.
“The fact is that he made some very free interventions in the tomb and in other dependencies where he arrived with the permission of the Archbishop of Burgos, and he had some freedom to act with somewhat strange practices. He took pieces to Madrid with the excuse of restoring them better that did not return in some cases and he hid the holes that he left with others ”, he continued.
With this strategy he came to gather an extraordinary collection of art (mainly Renaissance and Gothic), which he deposited in the Palacio del Pico, ordered to be built by him in Torrelodones (Madrid) at the beginning of the 20th century, even with pieces and artistic elements that he obtained with tricks. analogous.
This palace, where Antonio Maura died in 1925 and Carlos Saura filmed “Mom’s One Hundred Years” in 1978, was owned by the dictator Francisco Franco, whose family sold it in the eighties to a business group for a hotel project that never opened , until turning the enclosure into a closed and practically abandoned place.
The Count of the Battlements, adds this art historian who is the author among other studies of “The alienation of heritage in Castilla y León (1910-1936)”, auctioned his collection in 1927 through the Hispanist 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 corresponding members, “but who soon became dealers.”
James the Greater
“Santiago El Mayor was included in the collection. It was auctioned at the American Art Association and was a great event at the time because it was rare for such valuable and exquisite pieces to come out,” added Professor Martínez Ruiz, who specified that the piece went to a private collector before landing , around 1969, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which also preserves the monumental original grill of the cathedral of Valladolid.
In this friendly claim, without judicial procedure, the Junta de Castilla y León has not intervened, as confirmed to EFE by the Minister of Culture and Tourism, Gonzalo Santonja, who nevertheless has considered this matter as a “fair and timely” request.
“The claim seems fair to me because of how the sculpture came out, but many years have passed, almost a century, so everything will have to be well documented. These types of claims seem appropriate and necessary to me, but you have to do it very well so as not to throw stones at your cause”, he analyzed before offering the support of the Junta de Castilla y León to the Carthusian monks, who “have not communicated anything to us ”, Santonja concluded. EFE
