The Smiles of the Portal of Glory during Wartime: Science and the Defense of Art in the Axis Santiago-Madrid-Harvard in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century... and Today

Date and Time

September 16, 2016
01:00PM - 02:00PM EDT

Location

RCC, Main Seminar Room, 26 Trowbridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138

RCC is pleased to announce this lecture by Francisco Prado-Vilar, currently Director of Cultural and Artistic Projects at RCC and Scientific Director of the Andrew W. Mellon Program for the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

Three weeks before the rebel troops led by General Franco entered Madrid, effectively putting an end to the Spanish civil war, Ricardo de Orueta, former Director General of Fine Arts during the first Republican government, died of an accident falling down the stairs of the Casón del Buen Retiro, next to the Prado Museum, where he ha

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d been tirelessly working on his last book devoted to Spanish Romanesque sculpture. The manuscript, along with the memory of its author, whose efforts as a politician promoting laws for the preservation of Spain’s artistic heritage had eventually put him in contact with Harvard scholars, remained forgotten for decades. Specially moving is its final chapter, dedicated to the monument he deemed was the greatest masterpiece of medieval art, the Portal of Glory of the Cathedral of Santiago – a monument which is today the object of an ambitious research and conservation project whose discoveries are capturing international attention and whose headquarters are at Harvard’s Real Colegio Complutense.

Discussing a wealth of documentary and visual material from the Harvard archives and from archives in Spain, this lecture delves into the accomplishments
of the collaboration between Ricardo de Orueta and his Harvard colleagues, specially Arthur Kingsley Porter and Edward Forbes, then director of the Fogg Museum, in their defense of art during wartime. It concludes by presenting the solution to some of the mysteries regarding the Portal of Glory that had mesmerized Orueta on the pages of his manuscript and which have been recently solved in the context of the investigations of the Santiago Cathedral Project – a testament to the continuing accomplishments of the Harvard-Spain connection today.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsor:  RCC 

Contact:  rcc@harvard.edu

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