'The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew' (1607), by Caravaggio, has been in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, United States, since 1976.THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
The Cleveland Museum of Art made public in April 1976 the acquisition of a
caravaggio
.
Coming from Spain,
The Crucifixion of San Andrés
ended up hanging in the third largest art gallery in the United States - after the Metropolitan and the National Gallery - because the Qualification and Export Board that advised the Ministry of Culture never attributed its authorship to the Milanese master .
After the move, Ohio restorers restored the luster to the 1607 altarpiece, revealing a scene coinciding with that described in the inventory of its first owner: the Count of Benavente.
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The eighth count of Benavente, viceroy of Naples between 1603 and 1610, had to visit Caravaggio's studio in the city of Vesuvius, where he took refuge during his last years of life. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the painting was already in the nobleman's art archive. This record describes a "very large painting of Saint Andrew, naked when placed on the cross, with three executioners and a woman". The work spent centuries disappeared until, in 1973, the Madrid dealer José Manuel Arnaiz believed to locate it in a Valladolid convent that he never realized. The world learned of its existence in February of that same year thanks to the then director of the Prado Museum, Xavier de Salas, who cited the finding during a Roman symposium on Caravaggio. Then its authorship began to be discussed.
That September the piece was part of the
Caravaggio and Spanish Naturalism
exhibition
, organized by the Ministry of Education and held in the Alcázares of Seville. The curator Alfonso Pérez Sánchez presented it in the catalog as
El Martirio de San Felipe
, a title that was accompanied by a question mark. He maintained that this painting could not be the same one that belonged to Benavente, since it had to be represented with the cross in a cross, "an irreplaceable attribute in the iconography of San Andrés." However, the text of the sample recognized that its "
caravaggiesco
character
"
was beyond doubt, linking him to the "sure works of Caravaggio in his last three years of life." Arnaiz requested authorization to sell to a London intermediary house in Cleveland the altarpiece on which well-founded suspicions fell. And the Qualification Board granted such a passport.
De Salas himself made the decision; José María de Azcárate, professor of art; Fernando Chueca, Professor of Architecture; Martín Almagro, director of the National Archaeological Museum; María Elena Gómez Moreno; director of the Romantic Museum; Joaquín de la Puente, deputy director of the Prado, and an official of the Ministry of Finance whose identity was never revealed. The current Heritage Law, by which the members of the board must prove their knowledge to prosecute a work, had not yet been projected. "All of them being very illustrious, none of them specialized in Caravaggio", affirms the art historian José Manuel Cruz, who from 1987 and for two decades was part of that advisory body. “It has been said that the painting was very dirty and it was difficult to distinguish the figures.They were only revealed clearly after the restorations, ”he says.
The Cleveland Museum of Art analyzed the canvas using techniques that were testimonial in Spain at the time, such as X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. Through this system, Caravaggio's indelible signature was discovered: his
abbozzo,
slight sketches or incisions in the canvas that replaced the typical preparatory drawings. The
San Andrés
has three other versions, in the Back-Vega collection in Vienna, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon and in that of Santa Cruz in Toledo. “It is very important to study the status of the originality of the work based on its copies”, alerts the professor of History of Contemporary Art Benito Navarrete, who finds similarities between this case and a more recent one, that of the
caravaggio
which was going to be sold on April 8 at the Ansorena house in Madrid. "One was a colossal mistake and the other still has time to fix itself," he maintains.