Antoni Bassas' analysis: 'Either save the Sijena paintings or obey the Supreme Court's ruling'
You see, now, in the midst of this "normalization" phase, the Supreme Court has ruled that the paintings must leave where they have been preserved for nearly a century. Neither process nor stories.
This story of the transfer of the paintings from the chapter house of the Sijena Monastery It has been moving for years, enough years for us to have been sufficiently concerned here at the ARA.
In 2016 we published a double report, written and audiovisual, about the dispute, with three locations: Barcelona, where the MNAC is located with the paintings; Lleida, where the Diocesan Museum kept pieces from Sijena (Sijena belonged to the bishopric of Lleida); and Sijena itself.
We invite you to recover those reports, because they contain all the necessary information to understand that the transfer of the works, as the Supreme Court has decided in its ruling, is a serious breach of property responsibility, among other things. All the experts explain that if they touch the paintings, they could fall apart in their hands. Perhaps you've heard what happened: the paintings date back to the early 13th century, and when the Civil War broke out, nearly 90 years ago, they were burned by a group of anarchists (with the help of people from the town of Sijena itself) who set fire to the monastery, as happened with so many other churches on that July 18th. After two days of burning, a Generalitat official, Josep Gudiol, saved what he could and transported it to Barcelona. And what he could save were charred fragments, pieces that needed to be put back together. That's why, if you go to the MNAC, on Montjuïc, you'll see that these burned, sepia-toned paintings are complemented by others added later, so that you can understand what they represented. Although Gudiol did a magnificent job, he did it with the techniques available 90 years ago, and of course, they weren't as good as those available today. That's why moving the paintings means buying a lot of numbers to keep them in your hands, unless you take the entire structure to which they're attached and transport it to Sijena. And a curious fact: if you ever wanted to make a light map of what the paintings looked like, you should return to the MNAC and ask to see the color watercolors that the students of the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner painted in 1918 during a field trip to Sijena.
When the courts finally forced the removal of the pieces from the Lleida Museum and the claim for the MNAC paintings resurfaced, we were in the midst of the Trial, and the idea that was spread was that some Aragonese paintings should leave a Catalonia that could end up being independent or that wanted to be. You see that now, in the midst of this "normalization" phase, the Supreme Court rules that the paintings must leave where they have been preserved for nearly a century. Neither Trial nor stories. Furthermore, the Sijena claim has much to do with the offensive of the Spanish episcopate (which says that the unity of Spain "is a moral good to be protected"), which nearly 30 years ago touched the border of the diocese of Lleida, which reached as far as Catalan-speaking lands of the Aragonese Strip, to do so through the Aragonese Strip. Without that movement, we wouldn't have this. They also tried it with the diocese of Tortosa, which is part of the province of Castellón, but the people of the parishes there strongly opposed it.
This morning, from Japan, the president Isla has already shown her respect for the ruling Despite warning about the risk to property caused by the transfer, it's either one thing or the other: the ruling puts the work of art at risk.
