There were a few minutes for eleven in the morning when a team of half a dozen people discharged from two cars the necessary instruments to analyze the Roma Sijena murals exhibited at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC) and entered the enclosure. Among them were the three technicians designated by the Aragonese government to make an evaluation of the state of the work of the thirteenth century and study the technical reports on the state of the paintings prepared by experts in conservation and restoration of the MNAC. Its access occurred just a few days after the judge of the Court number 2 of Barcelona began the process of executing the sentence that orders to return that historical heritage to the monastery of Sijena.
The Technical Team of Aragon, led by the conservative-restaurant Natalia Martínez de Pisón, has easily avoided the concentration convened by the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), which had managed to gather less than fifty people at the gates of the MNAC offices access to protest the return. Among them were their president, Lluís Llach, in addition to other members of the institution’s leadership, and Juns leaders, such as President Laura Borràs. Aragonese workers, however, have accessed the enclosure for next access, where the parking lot is located, without any problem and without having to listen to the proclamations that were timidly crying out of attendees of concentration, such as “it is not justice, it is an plunder.”
Out of this noise, the Aragonese team, which has been received by its MNAC counterparts, has started its work concentrated in the so -called profane murals that are also exhibited in the MNAC. These works, also from the thirteenth century, are the ones that present the least risks to move, as the Barcelona Museum has expressed to the Aragonese court. But the choice of this analysis for the first day of works, which will last until Wednesday, basically obeys a logistics issue. They are located at the entrance of the area dedicated to Gothic, a basic area for the circulation of visitors and the closure of that room, as the Aragonese government claims and has also assumed the judge, would mean a problem in a normal day for the MNAC because of the volume of visitors it attends. One Monday, on the other hand, is a minor problem since it is the day of the week that the museum closes. At the moment they are making a photogrammetry of the paintings, a photograph of a very resolution to have details of the entire work.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the works will focus on the walls of the Chapter Room of the Monastery of Sijena, the most precious and the ones with the greatest conservation problems. These were started in 1936 after a great fire caused by militias at the beginning of the civil war. Josep Gudiol, who had previously photographed the monastery of Sijena, resolved that his rescue was urgent and achieved resources from the Generalitat to do it. Since then, the reconstruction of those ancient Romanesque murals is located in Barcelona, from a signed assignment the order occupied by the monastery.
The MNAC technicians, in addition to other renowned conservation experts, have warned that a transfer of these works cannot be made without causing “irreparable” damage. And that is the thesis that the direction of the MNAC intends to take to the end until the court, presenting a conflict of execution of sentence to ensure that the instructor is aware of the damage that can be caused on a heritage that is listed as a good of cultural interest.