The Supreme Court issued on May 27 a sentence in which it established that the paintings of the Chapter Room of the Monastery of Villanueva de Sijena (Huesca) that are preserved in the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC) of Barcelona, had to return to the Oscense monastery where they were rescued in 1936 after the fire that almost destroyed this important religious and cultural center during the first days of the civil war.
The sentence has not taken into account the overwhelming reports of national and international experts (including Gianluigi Colalucci, a restorative of the Miguel Ángel’s Sistine Chapel) that assured that a possible transfer from the MNAC, a museum that has the best collection of medieval wall painting in the world, would put them in danger in an irreversibly Fire of 1936 by the high temperatures reached.
The High Court corroborated two other previous sentences, issued by the Court of First Instance of Huesca and the Provincial Court of Huesca that gave the reason to the arguments presented by the Government of Aragon, on behalf of the nuns of the Order of San Juan, owners of the monastery, and denied the arguments defended by the MNAC.
During the trial and his media monitoring he was questioned, and described as plundering, the safeguard carried out by the historian of the Catalan art and architect Josep Gudiol I Ricart, which, in October 1936, started the paintings of the room destroyed with the technique of the strain and took them to Barcelona. This same expert was hired by the diocese of Jaca in the 60s to save the paintings of the churches of the depopulated localities to avoid their loss due to environmental causes or looting; Some works that can be seen in the Diocesan Museum of this city.
But this sentence, which assumes that Sikena will once again have this art masterpiece of 1200, an unique example of Hispanic medieval art, to exhibit them in the monastery chapter room, it is a real poisoned candy. It is not just about the risk that supposes, as the reports that the MNAC has enforced, that the paintings irreparably suffer with their transfer, but the change of location, of a first -class museum to a building that has not finished its rehabilitation process, alters the environmental conditions that preserve it.
From the Junta de Aragón they ensure that the conditions of the room are unbeatable. But there are reasons to doubt it, since before they had said the same and it was not true. In February 2017, then President Javier Lambán, of the PSOE, said, in the same monastery, before the journalists convened, that the Chapter Chamber met all the conditions and that the paintings would be better than in the MNAC because its facilities were more modern and because Barcelona was a humid city, by the sea. But that same day it was found that the Chamber did not have any air conditioning, since it was not part of the reform project presented, as graphically summarized to this journalist Fernando López Barrena, chief architect of the Conservation and Restoration Service of the Heritage of Aragon with the Castiza phrase: “Why light the oven if the chicken is not inside.”
This week, after the sentence of the Supreme, the current president of Aragon, Jorge Azcón, of the PP, insisted on the same idea that the paintings would be better in Huesca for the “saline environment of Barcelona” and, without providing any report, said that the Chamber is “in perfect magazine to store and save those paintings in perfect security and in a very short time expose them.”
According to Azcón, there is a technical plan prepared by a working group that includes disassembly, transfer, conservation, restoration and exposure of paintings; A plan that, acknowledges Aragon, has been developed without its technicians having analyzed the state of the paintings directly in the MNAC, before the museum’s refusal to access without a firm sentence.
But there are other problems that must be solved before the return of the paintings to Sijena. One is that the dimension and curvature of the arches created to install the paintings in the MNAC and those of the chapter room are different; Something that makes fresh fragile have a difficult lace and will undoubtedly force greater manipulation and greater risk for works.
The Aragonese conservatives are unaware of the state of the paintings, given the impossibility of studying them because of the refusal of letting them move from the MNAC, but they do know that the current, cotton supports – which after the start and restoration of Gudiol passed from these mural paintings to be canvases installed in racks – are prone, if there are moisture changes, to the proliferation of bacteria and mushroom Problem to their conservation If, finally, they travel to Sijena.
It is not a minor issue: the monastery of Sijena, founded in 1118 by Queen Sancha de Castilla on a lagoon, has suffered an endemic problem of moisture that affected the survival of the building. That is why the last nuns of the monastery abandoned him in 1970 and settled in the convent that had the order in Valldoreix (Barcelona). From Aragon it is ensured that moisture problems have been solved, after investing more than one million euros in improving these aspects.
They will have to be very attentive to the fact that this moisture, which is sneaking by capillarity through the walls, does not affect the paintings, once installed in the chapter room. The humidity endangered another jewel of the Romanesque: the paintings of the 12th century of San Baudelio de Berlanga (Soria), which, after being reimbursed in 2002 on the walls of this hermitage, were attacked by a fungus that forced in 2011 to close the temple and carry out a comprehensive intervention and to make an exhaustive review of the temperature and moisture conditions of the temple to prevent these works from being lost forever.