Voces del Prado

The Considerable Challenge of the Prado Disperso

Mercedes Orihuela Maeso, Conservator of the Service of Deposits, 1975-Up to date

The Museum had documentation corresponding to absolutely everything that had left the Museum, either by Royal Order during the monarchic period, or by Ministerial Order. And absolutely all of the delivery receipts had been preserved for the works. What happened when we began to visit the different institutions with the prosecutor? Well, some of the institutions hadn’t been visited by staff from the Museo del Prado in more than a hundred years. They considered the works to be a gift rather than a loan and, naturally, they had to be put right on that. Some institutions, such as the Supreme Court, would you believe, whose works had been asked to be visited by various Trustees, and the Trustees had been told that they had absolutely nothing from the Museo del Prado there. So we told them, “well look, you have this, this and this”. I mention the Supreme Court because they suffered a dreadful fire in 1915 and a large part of the works deposited there had been destroyed, many of them loaned by the Museum. However, there was no precise list of everything they had, which is why we subsequently found a number of paintings that we thought had been burned at the Supreme Court. That is to say, there were no exact lists to compare what they had with, and what had happened before the fire really was a complete robbery, which is why some things disappeared later on, after many years. They disappeared either through antique-dealers or through other museums; some were really big bodies. Some paintings had been cut out of their frames and sold in pieces.
When the inquiry ended, the prosecutor sent us a copy of his final report and he concluded that all the items that had gone missing were the result of the historical situation in Spain. We’re talking about 1872, and if you look back in history, you can see that there wasn’t just a Civil War, but other things too. With regard to the Spanish embassies abroad, some of the works were destroyed by bombs in Berlin or, in the case of the Embassy of Saint Petersburg, they were destroyed in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He concluded that, out of the 7,000 works that the extra-parliamentary parties had claimed were missing, the real number came to less than two hundred, and the majority of these had been destroyed by these kinds of tragic event.
Based on this documentation, we began to compile a list of everything we knew existed and everything that was untraced, a phrase we used because you never knew what you might discover (we have the experience of having located some things) and also everything we knew had been definitively destroyed. Then, in the company of restorers or some volunteer, I travelled all over Spain on various occasions in order to check on whether the works actually existed, where they were located, their state of preservation, etc. So the Deposits Service facilitated the inquiry completely. Now it’s all very simple: you press the button marked SAC [System for Access to the Collections] and everything you need to know appears. But when I was faced with all this at the time, you can’t imagine the state of chaos that existed.