In 1905, the International Antiquities Agent appeared by the Segovian Villa de Cuéllar to close a succulent business. The vault of the former convent of San Francisco had collapsed a year earlier, burying an important part of the alabaster funeral set that Beltrán de la Cueva, first Duke of Alburquerque and right hand of the Castilian king Enrique IV, had ordered to build at the end of the 15th century for his family. The sepulcher of his second wife and his brother’s, located on the cruise, had saved themselves from ruin. Harris had no doubts: the two Renaissance graves would have a good sale in the art market. After the refusal of the British Museum Victoria & Albert, it would be the American Archer Milton Huntington who acquired them to provide funds, an institution dedicated to the dissemination of Hispanic art in the United States, which was about to open its doors (1908). “The graves are star pieces of the Hispanic sculpture collection, splendid examples of the Gothic and Renaissance art of the Spain of 1500”, values Patrick Lenaghan, current conservative of sculpture in the Hispanic.
In Spain, the ruinous convent would be dedicated to flour mill, a booming activity in the Cuéllar of the late nineteenth century. While the building received an unworthy use of its past, some of the pieces of the sepulcher that Beltrán de la Cueva shared with its first and third wives were disappearing to arrive in different destinations, including Spanish museums – as the Marés de Barcelona – and the United States. The sits that crowned the mausoleum, which can be seen with difficulty in the center of the church thanks to a valuable photograph taken before the collapse, their track was lost. The successive discouragement practiced by the City Council of the Segovian town, new owner of the former convent, would end the (abundant) remaining fragments in an unknown whereabouts … Until today, when a surprising initiative and studies of a university professor have rescued them from neglect and oblivion.
The preparation of an exhibition to commemorate the fifth centenary of the death of the Basque sculptor of La Zarza – a show that will take place this year in the – led the steps of Ismael Mont towards the ex -convent of San Francisco. “We believe that the hand of the artist Gil de Siloé (author of the Royal Sepulcher of the Cartuja de Miraflores, a masterpiece of the Gothic) is in the five sits of the funeral set of Cuéllar; but Siloe dies and is Basque of the bramble who ends the work,” says the professor of the University of Salamanca. De la Zarza, author of one of the peak works of the entire Renaissance – the funeral monument of the toast, in the Cathedral of Ávila – was “one of the pioneers of the Renaissance sculpture in the crown of Castile,” says Ismael Mont. It is precisely this circumstance, according to the historian, what makes the missing remains of the Beltrán tomb of the cave sculpted by the artist: “This work is among the first sculptural manifestations of the Renaissance in Spain.”
But what had happened in the former convent that had caught the teacher’s attention? “The councilor of Culture of Cuéllar, historian and a policy as God commands, had undertaken the huge project to seek the fragments disintegrated from the moundy,” explains Mont. However unusual it seems, the pieces of the friezes carved by Basque de la Zarza began to appear in the most unsuspected places, “fundamentally, in the Pinar, in a dump,” reveals the professor of the University of Salamanca. The initiative occurred to Maite Sánchez, Councilor for Culture and Tourism in the City of Cuéllar since 2009. “Upon arriving at office, and as they knew she was a historian of art, the town’s townspeople, the oldest staff of services, she told me: ‘Look, we are going to teach you some of the sites where the heritage of the convent of San Francisco is,” reveals Sánchez. The councilor began a crusade to locate the stones of the sepulcher of the Dukes, which began to face, next to tiles and plasteries of the old monastery, in spaces such as “El Pinar, the back of the football field, the convent of Santa Clara, or in a ship, hidden in pallets,” says the mayor.
The initiative of the Councilor for Culture, determined to rescue the degraded convent of San Francisco and turn it into a cultural center, began to obtain surprising results. “We repurchase the puzzle and we have discovered that we have whole walls of tiles from the convent,” he quotes as an example. As for the pieces of the Beltrán de la Cueva Tumulus, Ismael Mont calculates that “more than 50% of the original work has gathered”. “Some are only very damaged alabaster fragments, but there are also large pieces where the iconography of Basque de la Zarza is appreciated,” describes Mont, who highlights the “symbolic importance for the history of Castile” that has the set to which they belong, to which it compares with the aforementioned Siloé in the whereabouts of the fields that crowned the triple grave that did not travel to New York. An enigma. “I would not be surprised if they were stored in a place not so far from the church, where they have spent years without identifying, because the history of the monument and the importance of these deposits still does not appreciate,” values Patrick Lenaghan, conservative of the Hispanic Society and a deep connoisseur of the whole.
And now what? A hypothetical recreation of the Beltrán Tumulus of the cave seems like a suggestive and tempting option to dignify the original remains and generate a new tourist attraction for the area … but it is not so simple. “Local politicians cannot do everything we would like; the pieces of the sepulcher only have them in custody, since they belong to the current Duke of Alburquerque, and we do not know if, in the future, the government team that comes will decide to take care of them like us,” says Maite Sánchez. The head of Culture admits to having “good relations” with the Ducal house of Alburquerque, whose foundation manages in the Segovian villa valuable archives available to the researchers, which cover almost a millennium of history. However, Sánchez is suspicious of the real interest of the aristocrat Juan Miguel Osorio and Beltrán de Lis in the fragments of the burial of his predecessor: “We do not know if the Duke will decide to guard these pieces in a different way from ours.”
Since they defend that Osorio “has special affection” for the former convent of San Francisco as “axis of the Ducal House”, and explain that an agreement, signed several years ago, established that the ownership of the building would be municipal (in fact, they just acquired new units of the old convent), while certain fragments would be, in effect, owned by the Duke. “It is only a few pieces of a much broader set that belongs to the City of Cuéllar,” says Lucía Velasco, director of the Foundation, who clarifies, in any case, that “for us, it would be very interesting to recreate the grave with the authentic pieces, and we are open to all possible roads.” Ismael Mont bets, on his side, to “inform the society that this has appeared and that is guarded by the City Council as a legitimate owner. Now, a restoration process would have to be carried out and, then, of musealization, so that all this is there,” says the professor of the University of Salamanca.
