Catalan Romanesque paintings lost more than fifty years ago found in a private Swiss collection

Two researchers from the University of Barcelona (UB) have found six pieces of Catalan Romanesque paintings lost more than fifty years ago in a Swiss private collection.

Professor Milagros Guardia and Professor Juan Antonio Olañeta, members of the Ars Picta research group, identified these pieces, one of which is a painting of Saint Gervasius, originally from the church of Santa Maria de Cap d’Aràn in Tredós, one of the most historically important churches in the Aran Valley and from which a large part of the paintings is currently exhibited in The Cloisters museum in New York.

Three other panels found — two apostles and a depiction of the Christian fish symbol — come from the church of San Lorenzo de Isavarre.

The images of these four works are kept in the archives of the Maso archive of the Instituto Amatller de Arte Hispánico, but for more than fifty years no one knew where they were.

As UB reported this Wednesday, art historians were unaware of the existence of the other two found works representing the symbols of St. Luke and St. Mark: the bull and lion from the Church of Sant Iscle and Santa Victoria (Surp).

The Romanesque art painted in the churches of the Pyrenees has an important history of being torn from the walls, from the outside, to be transferred to museums for conservation and display — as is the case with the works on view at the National Art Museum of Catalonia. .. — or for sale to private collections around the world.

The journey of these six paintings goes back to their beginning in the 40s, in the hands of Ramón Gudiol, and their subsequent sale at the initiative of antiquarian Josep Bardoleta.

They were bought by the Swiss collector Arthur Wilhelm and in the 1960s, after his death, they were stored in the Basel Art Museum, which did not identify which churches the works were from, until they finally became part of a private museum in 2008. the collection in which they are currently located.

UB researchers traced the pieces to the Art Museum in Basel and asked the museum to contact the current owners, who facilitated viewing and photographing the pieces.

“We experts rarely have the opportunity to bring back some of those prodigal children, those parts of our heritage that have been lost; and more in this case, which are pieces that are part of some of the sets that are most influenced by the patrimonial diaspora,” the researchers confirm.

This discovery was published in the journal Lambard: Studies in Medieval Artfrom the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, and soon the researchers will present other works in which they will try to recompose the groups of images found.