Ginés Donaire |
Jaén (EFE)
After its location, a group of archaeologists from Jaén is mobilizing to urge the Junta de Andalucía to bid for the acquisition of this piece, which would become part of the collection of the Museo Ibero de Jaén.
The value of this piece lies in the fact that it is one of the only two Iberian diadems (or Iberas) known to date. The other, that of Jávea (Alicante), is on display at the National Archaeological Museum.
The one that is now on sale is a diadem made of gold and articulated in three subunits, with a little more than thirty centimeters in length.
Professor Arturo Ruiz, for many years director of the University Institute for Research in Iberian Archeology at the University of Jaén, explains to EFE that the diadem was made with bands of processions of symbolic and schematic doves or landscapes of palm trees.
“It is made with the technique of granules and filigree linked to the influence of Greek goldsmithing on an Iberian substrate with a strong Phoenician or oriental cultural survival and with a date from the end of the s. IV or early s. III ane”, says Ruiz.
Private collection
But the Madrid diadem has not only surfaced from the bottom of a private collection, unknown to researchers, but has also made it possible to document the place of its origin and the history of its silent wandering through the 20th century and so far in the 21st. .
As Arturo Ruiz explains, his discovery must have been made at a time in the first decades of the 20th century and became part of the collection of Félix García de Olaya, of La Rioja origin, who lived in Jaén since he was 13 years old.
Félix García de Olaya was also a correspondent of the Royal Academy of History since 1890, under the patronage of the academic Joaquín Costa, and died in 1922, the date that acts as the final limit to establish when the discovery of the gold diadem took place, since belonged to his collection.
In any case, it is known that the collection already existed in 1878 because on this date, according to the Lope de Sosa magazine in 1928, the collector donated half an arroba of Roman imperial coins for the casting of two bells in the cathedral of Jaén, which It is justified by the fact that he possessed ancient coins “in an extraordinary quantity”.
After a long silence, a descendant of Félix García de Olaya, a great-nephew named Ángel de la Riva Resines, who apparently later resided in Benalmádena (Málaga), decided to sell the collection of antiquities or part of it and selected a diadem, of his absolute property, which he cites as “a Greco-Phoenician necklace or pectoral”.
The piece is indicated in the invoice that it was sold for seven hundred thousand pesetas and it is said of it that “it is made of gold, whose approximate age is six hundred years before Jesus Christ” and it is added in the sale contract that said necklace was found in Montizón, near Aldeahermosa and Castellar, in the province of Jaén.
Arturo Ruiz believes that there is enough data to support the origin of this jewel, which he does not hesitate to define as the Montizón diadem.
A jewel, typical of an Iberian queen
“The jewel, typical of an Iberian queen, which in the Montizón area should be none other than the queen of Cástulo, arrived at a new collection in Madrid where it lost its reference until 2022, in which its owners have decided to sell it. ”, says Ruiz, who is also president of the Association of Friends of the Iberians of Jaén.
“It is very important not to allow this diadem, found in these lands and recognized as a unique jewel for its great aesthetic and technical quality due to the symbolic charge of its images, to be diluted again in the mists and oblivion of other private collections” , emphasizes Professor Ruiz.
Gold jewelry in the culture of the Iberians is very exceptional, and pieces such as the extraordinary earrings from Santiago de la Espada (Jaén), with the representation of the goddess and the dove, were lost in the fifties in the Valencia Institute of Don Juan, without his current whereabouts being known.
Similarly, the earrings from Granada ended up in the British Museum.