Until the list of the 41 works that will arrive at the Fine Arts at the beginning of summer is made official, and which are expected to be shown in public from the second half of September, it is impossible to “assess” the “millionaire” inheritance received by the German collector who died of coronavirus on January 30, González Tornel assured yesterday.
In any case, beyond the economic, the great value that this collection brings to the Fine Arts is to complete a pictorial account in which seventeenth century art from the Netherlands is now represented by the spectacular Portrait of Francisco de Moncada , by Anton van Dyck (recovered in February after several years of restoration) and little else.
Thus, according to the museum director, the arrival of Gerstenmaier’s monographic collection balances and completes the dominance of the Spanish and Italian Baroque school, but also that of religious painting on other themes.
“Due to the origins of the museum we have a much higher proportion of religious painting than of any other genre,” González Tornel indicated yesterday. But this collection has a lot of genre paintings as well as religious ones: still lifes, landscapes and flower paintings … Adding them to our collection is good for us because it helps the visitor not to get bored ».
On December 30 – just one month before his death – Gerstenmaier modified his will to donate a part of his private collection to the Fine Arts, one of the most important in Spain. The decision, says González Tornel, was not known by the museum director until two weeks ago Fernández Vallejo, the businessman’s widower, informed him.
The curious thing about the case is that, as the director pointed out yesterday, the Fine Arts is not part of the list of fifty cultural centers in Europe and America to which the couple of collectors have temporarily ceded their oil paintings and engravings to expose them. to the public. For example, when the exhibition “From Rubens to Van Dyck” was in 2014, València was exhibited at the Center del Carme. “Rodolfo and Leoncio had the idea that the collection would not disintegrate when they were missing, and for some reason they decided that the most important part of their collection would end up at the Bellas Artes”, explained González Tornel.
The quality of the collection is, according to the director, endorsed by this wide dissemination that it has had in recent years but also by the studies carried out on it by experts such as Matías Díaz Padrón, honorary president of the Moll Institute specialized in Flemish painting. One of the researchers at this institute, Magdala García Sánchez de la Barreda, participated in 2012 in the cataloging of Flemish painting in the Gerstenmaier collection.
The director of the Moll Institute, Ana Diéguez-Rodríguez, highlighted yesterday that the donation of this private collection, one of the most important in Spain, “is splendid news, not only for the Museo Bella Artes because it complements the collection it has very well. , but also for other collectors who have wonderful pieces and who can see how in provincial museums they can look better than in national museums, where it can be more diluted ».
Gerstenmaier’s donation to the Museum of Fine Arts includes masterpieces by Rubens, Gaspar Peeter Verbruggen, Marten des Voos or Van Dyck, but, as Pablo González Tornel advanced yesterday, not the “Adoration of the Magi” by the Von Groote circle, which does It was shown in various exhibitions.
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