This Tuesday, the Government of Aragon presented the conclusions of the reports that its technicians carried out last July on the vestiges of the original Romanesque paintings from the Sijena monastery that are currently exhibited in the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC). The analysis rejects the thesis of the Catalan museum’s conservation team about the extreme fragility of the paintings due to their chemical reactivity and the risk of moving them. In fact, the general director of Culture, Pedro Olloqui, has denounced “the carelessness in the care” of the 12th century works in Barcelona and has stated: “It is safer to install them in the Sijena monastery.”
According to him, during the inspection carried out at the end of July, “a strong contamination of the space, with abundant dirt,” was found behind the paintings. In a photograph shown, a cigarette butt is visible. And the person in charge of the technical work on behalf of Aragón, Natalia Martínez de Pisón, has assured that the analysis has made it possible to find humidity in various areas of two arches of the murals, which could correspond to humidity present on the ceiling of the room and not visible because it was covered by the frames. The technician has explained that in some images there are traces of runoff, so they suspect that they were not mere humidity but direct water leaks.
The MNAC describes the accusation of the Government of the Provincial Council of Aragon as “falsehood”. On Monday he sent a document to the instructor of the case in which he stated: “the probability of water leaks in this space and its direct impact on the paintings is practically nil, due to the physical characteristics of the building, the construction environment of the room and the independent nature of the museum installation with respect to the walls that contain it” and that the dampness existing in the ceiling must have been prior to the installation of the Romanesque murals in 1995 and that were not painted. He also defends that these stains are “old” and the wooden structures on which they are dry.
However, according to Olloqui’s explanations, the state of the paintings is “stable, very similar to the original state of the painting” when they were removed and that the disassembly, transportation to the Huesca monastery and subsequent assembly “do not present significant risks.” Martínez de Pisón, for his part, has assured that the paintings, “whether they had to come or not, demand an intervention.” “Zero risk does not exist,” he admitted, and then downplayed the transfer: “the risk forecast is minimal.” The plan proposed by the Aragonese Government involves dismantling the paintings into 72 pieces, the longest being just over three meters.
The legacy of the Sijena monastery is the center of a long judicial dispute that has pitted the Aragonese Government and the Villanueva de Sijena City Council against the MNAC. Last May, the Supreme Court ruled that the works had to return to the place from where they were removed in 1936, in the middle of the Civil War and after some militiamen burned the ecclesiastical premises, a fire that destroyed the roof and severely affected the paintings, which were urgently removed and transferred to Barcelona. The ruling now has to be executed by a court in Huesca, where a last battle of technical significance is being fought. While the Aragonese side seeks arguments to accelerate the restitution work, the MNAC (and now the Generalitat) tries to convince the judge that the museum houses the best conditions for the care of the murals, that any movement will cause irreversible damage and that the transfer will involve a great deal of cutting up the frames. The management does not want to undertake work that could damage a listed heritage asset and whose weakness is endorsed by the International Center for the Study of Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Assets (Iccrom), the greatest authority on the matter.
“Lack of diligence” as they are not Catalan
Precisely, Olloqui wanted to deny this “interested, idealized and mythologized story.” It is, he stressed, “false and inaccurate.” In fact, in the framework of a press conference in Zaragoza, he said that for the MNAC the works that covered the walls and arches of the chapter house of the Sijena monastery “are valued but they are not loved, because they are the cultural heritage of Aragon” and “they do not have due care.” His attack has gone further when, asked by a journalist, he has said that the MNAC has not met “the desirable and necessary standards”, that “sufficient diligence is lacking” and that “if that heritage had been from Catalonia it would have been more loved.”