Walter W. S. Cook

The Museo Del Patriarca of Valencia

Spain is probably second to no country in Europe in the possession of splendid ecclesiastical collections and museums. In the field of conservation and restoration, much valuable work has been done within the past decade so that these treasures are now more readily available to the scholarly public for study and enjoyment.The so-called Museo del Patriarca is a part of the Real Colegio y Seminario de Corpus Christi de Valencia, to give it its proper name. An oasis of peace and the pleasures of the spirit in the heart of the city, it looks out across the square to the University which in a sense it complements. The library, archives, and musical collection of rare and early items alone would constitute a valid claim to fame. The church with its numerous chapels, also endowed by the founder and richly decorated, is important in the world of Catholicism for its special cult of the Eucharist, in rites which are solemnized with the utmost pomp and splendor. The organ is superb and the music famous.

The Museum of Navarra, Pamplona

The new Museo de Navarra in Pamplona, one of the latest of the museums of Spain to be reorganized, was opened officially in June 1956. The importance of the great artistic and archaeological heritage of Navarra, due in part to its geographic location, was recognized a century ago. When a Provincial Commission of Monuments of Navarra was formed in 1860, the work of collecting from churches, monasteries and historic houses was intensified with the aim of establishing a museum. With a true sense of the fitting, to house their treasures they selected a building dating back to the Middle Ages, solidly constructed and in the old part of the town, the Camara de Comptos Reales de Navarra, or Royal Exchequer and Mint itself an historic exhibit. Finally with many new acquisitions, their collections outgrew these quarters.

New Art Museums in Spain

The establishment of public museums is an outcome of the French Revolution. During the Middle Ages great works of art had been accumulated in palaces, churches and monasteries, and although the rapid growth of the cult of art for arts sake which the Renaissance had fomented among the cultivated classes, stimulated the formation of valuable collections, yet cathedrals, monasteries and convents, royal palaces and those of the nobility still constituted the only art museums. However, the French Revolutionists who regarded all this rich treasure as the property of the nation, provided Napolean with a reason for organizing the museum of the Louvre with the unclaimed —or unreturned—works of art which had disappeared from their rightful places in churches or palaces, the very considerable loot of his campaigns. Later, further contributions were urgently requested and reluctantly sent.

The New Museum of Ceramics in Valencia

The Museo Nacional de, Ceramica “Gonzalez Marti,” now installed in the historic Palace of the Marquises of Dos Aguas in Valencia and open to the public since June 1954, is formed principally of the invaluable collection presented to the State by its founder and director, Don Manuel Gonzalez Marti, with the sole condition attached that it remain in Valencia. Sr. Gonzalez Marti is well known in the world of art and scholarship for his distinguished book on the pottery of eastern Spain, the Levante as it is called familiarly, a work truly monumental and definitive and doubly valuable in coming from one who understands the craftsmanship involved as well as the art and archaeology. In these interests he was ably assisted and seconded by his wife, Senora Dona Amelia Cunat Monleon, hardly less devoted and enthusiastic than he in what has been the avocation of a lifetime.

A New Spanish Institute

The many friends of Jose Gudiol, who was in this country from 1939 to 1941 as Lecturer at New York University and Carnegie Professor of Spanish Art at the Toledo Museum of Art, will be interested to know of the Instituto Amattler de Arte Hispanica, which he founded immediately after his return to Barcelona in June of 1941.The new institute is housed in the palace of Miss Teresa Amattler, who is the sponsor of the plan. The palace, built by Puig y Cadafalch, contains many works of art of great importance, notably a distinguished collection of Spanish mediaeval glass collected by Miss Amattler and her father.