Museums, defends the director of the MNAC, Pepe Serra, explain stories and stories, and few stories are as exciting and as artistically relevant as the bizarre journey of the frescoes of Annibale Carracci for the Herrera chapel of the church of Santiago de los Españoles in Rome. A journey from the Italy of the 17th century to the Spain of the 21st with ramifications in the Prado Museum, the MNAC in Barcelona and the church of Montserrat in Rome.
An odyssey that, almost two hundred years later, culminates in the best possible way: with almost all the paintings that Carracci made for the chapel (three are missing, hence the almost, which were considered lost in the 19th century) brought together for the first time since they were uprooted in 1833. A rescue operation that also makes it possible to vindicate the figure of a revolutionary but little-known artist who, according to the curator of the exhibition and deputy director of Conservation at the Prado Museum, Andrés Úbeda, «decided to contest art prevalent at that time.
“We are talking about an important restitution”, underlines Úbeda just before recalling that Annibale Carracci (Bologna, 1560-Rome, 1609) was, together with Caravaggio, one of the greatest reformers of baroque painting. “Don’t be fooled by the little presence and little knowledge that currently exists of this character,” he warns. «The exhibition recounts an absolutely fundamental moment in the evolution of Western painting, such as the early years of the 17th century in Rome. And it does so through a fundamental painter such as Carracci”, adds the director of the Prado Museum, Miguel Falomir, during the presentation of an exhibition that, after weighing anchor at the Madrid art gallery last March, ends up in Barcelona until October 9.
«Do not be fooled by the little presence and the little knowledge that currently exists of this character»
Andres Ubeda
Deputy Director of Conservation of the Prado Museum
In November, when Annibale Carracci. The frescoes of the Herrera chapel’ A trip to the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome will close a circle that began to be drawn in 1602, when the banker from Palencia Juan Enríquez de Herrera commissioned the Italian painter to decorate a chapel dedicated to the Franciscan monk San Diego de Alcalá. Carracci, who had just finished the sensational Farsene Gallery, He threw himself into the project, but after a couple of years his body said enough was enough and a serious illness left him sidelined. He would be Francesco Albani, Close collaborator of Carracci, the one in charge of finishing the frescoes always under the supervision of the master and with his preparatory drawings as a map to follow. A dozen of these sketches, belonging to the British Royal Collection, are also exhibited at the MNAC together with the funeral books of the King and Queen of Spain that show the interior of the church.
A square full of treasures.
The church of Santiago de los Españoles, currently Nuestra Signora del Sacro Cuore, was from the mid-16th century to the 18th century one of the places of greatest religious, symbolic and representative importance of the Spanish monarchy in Rome. Linked to the Crown of Castile, it shares the limelight in Piazza Navona in Rome with none other than Sant’Agnese in Agone and the Bernini and Borromini fountains
The great attraction of the show, however, is in the wall paintings that Carracci devised for the church in Plaça Navona and that are shown in Barcelona with a somewhat different set-up than the one in Madrid. “We wanted to emphasize an issue that is very important in our collection: mural painting applied to architecture and the entire heritage issue of what happens to frescoes when they are pulled out due to danger, war or weather,” explains Pepe Serra. Hence, without reproducing the original layout of the chapel, the MNAC has opted for verticality and for displaying the frescoes from a height.
From splendor to oblivion
Andrés Úbeda explains that, during the 17th and 18th centuries, every time a reference to the Carracci chapel appeared, the praise was superlative, but the 19th century arrived and everything changed: the decline of the Spanish presence in Italy, added to the problems of maintenance of the church, led to a race “to the ruin” and the sale of the church. Before that, in 1833, the paintings were removed in an operation carried out by Pellegrino Succi and temporarily deposited in the church of Montserrat in Rome. 19 frescoes entered but only 16 embarked in 1850 bound for Barcelona. The other three? No one knows what happened to them. Nor is it known what happened so that nine fragments stayed in Barcelona and another seven traveled to Madrid. “A series of dark episodes unfold that I have not been able to unravel,” says Úbeda.
Initially, adds the curator, the final destination was Madrid, but Isabel II, through a royal order, gave the paintings to the city of Barcelona. «Without us knowing how or why, a part of these paintings ends up traveling to Madrid, to the Museo de la Trinidad. The nine largest fragments remained in Barcelona and the seven smallest traveled to Madrid. How the queen’s will was twisted is something that I have not been able to unravel, “says Úbeda.
It is just then that Carracci’s masterpiece disappears from the map, “from books and from knowledge.” “In 1971, a monograph was even written that considered the frescoes unrecoverable and said that the last chapter of Carracci’s life was impossible to know,” says the curator. The reality, however, was that the paintings remained in Madrid and Barcelona waiting for someone to decide to do something with them.
In the nineties, the MNAC already undertook a process of restoring its nine pieces, but it took nearly two decades for the Prado to get down to work with its own. The state of conservation of the frescoes, however, did not augur anything new. “We were not convinced that we could get here,” slips the curator while pointing to the magnificent ‘Eternal Father’ of Francesco Albani that finished off the lantern of the chapel. Next to it, the trapezoids and ovals that narrate the life of the saint and the splendid frescoes dedicated to the ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ and to the ‘Apostles around the empty tomb of the Virgin’ confirm that, after all, it has come to fruition.