Voces del Prado

Unusual Cases Regarding the Prado Disperso IV: From Madrid to Caracas

Mercedes Orihuela Maeso, Conservator of the Service of Deposits, 1975-What's on

We had deposited some works at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. We visited them one day and the following week we returned to take photographs, but the two works were no longer there. “But they were here, at the Palace of Viana [Madrid]”. So we began to investigate and we discovered that there was a diplomat on the Ministry staff who was responsible for supervising the furniture and decorative items at embassies, and who’d just been bought the building for the Spanish Embassy in Caracas, a detached house that formed part of the Country Club complex. And he’d taken the two pictures which were in the repository and a picture that belonged to the Minister at that time, Marcelino Oreja Aguirre, without asking him. There was a great to-do, as you can imagine. The man was relieved of his duties and they created a Patrimony Department to monitor the situation better. But our paintings, which had been deposited at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, are still at the Spanish Embassy in Caracas. And they’re fine. In fact, we’ve seen them recently.