Study carried out by Ballester: on the left, the images that are preserved of the Immaculate Conception of Salzillo, destroyed in 1931. In the center, three images of the cast made by Carmen Sánchez, a copy of the original image of Salzillo. On the right, the overlay in photoshop of the images, which coincide. /
The institution presents today in an exhibition a casting of the original made by Carmen Sánchez and a clay sketch of the Christ of the Arrest, both from the collection of photographer Juan Ballester
“History is precious,” says the photographer Juan Ballester, friend and enemy of artists, art critic and collector, enthusiastically. Retired cop blood still flows through his veins. In his early twenties he was already fond of antiques through his uncle, the painter Mariano Ballester. He showed a special predilection for the ceramics of Manises. «A fairly old man, short and with very white hair, entered the tobacco shop in Vistabella (Murcia), and he asked if we knew of anyone who bought fountains. And, of course, I bought fountains. ‘Myself!’ I told him. I accompanied him to his house, on the second floor of a block in Vistabella, and among the things there I noticed a half-head from Salzilles. He told me that he was the widower of a daughter of Araciel, Carmen Sánchez Giner, and that what he was going to show me was a casting that his wife made of a Virgin that was in Santa Catalina. He also had, the size of a palm, a head of a Christ, a sketch that I thought was of the Araciel [una familia de escultores]. He sold me both things for a hundred pesetas, that is, sixty cents now. He practically gave them to me. The fountains were worth a thousand pesetas, and he didn’t give any value to the rest».
This is how Ballester tells LA TRUTH how Alonso Rubio, husband of the sculptor and restorer Carmen Sánchez, son of the sculptor Francisco Sánchez Araciel (1851-1918) and granddaughter of the sculptor Francisco Sánchez Tapia (1831-1902), sold him two pieces that, After more than 40 years, today they are presented in society, in the Salzillo Museum, as the Immaculate Conception of Salzillo and a reconstructed sketch of Christ that leads us to the passage of the Arrest of Salzillo. An event for the director of the institution, María Teresa Marín, who confirms that the plaster cast of the head of what was believed to be the Dolorosa de Santa Catalina is, in fact, “a cast of the renowned and mourned Immaculate of the Franciscan convent of the Plano de San Francisco. This discovery is of great interest. This would mean that, for the time being, he is the most faithful witness we have left of that work by Salzillo lost forever».
The image, as recalled by the art historian and academic of Alfonso X, two meters high, “perished in the burning of the convent of San Francisco on May 12, 1931, the day of Salzillo’s birth, in the anticlerical revolts that occurred at the month of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. «Its formal features seem to take us back to Antiquity, which denotes the great classicism of Salzillo’s sculpture, which was already highlighted by his first biographers, such as Luis Santiago Bado, who spoke of his ‘heated imagination’ that ‘transported him to ancient Greece , to the rich Rome and the magnificent Florence’».
Ballester remembers that, when his children were young and he had little to do with Murcia, “one day I saw that they were painting in the clay Christ, they lived there with the works.” In the 1990s, when Cristóbal Belda entrusted Ballester with the photographs of the restoration of the Salzillos, which was carried out by the restorer Mari Paz Barbero, “I was there and I could see the Christ of the Arrest face to face and I felt a closeness. Because he looked like my little Christ. I went on my motorcycle to get the piece, I brought it with me and in front of the museum lived the sculptor Sánchez Lozano, who was very old, who was in his nineties, and he took it in his hands and said, without stopping: ‘The Master , teacher’. Another day Gaya was watching it and told me: ‘If it’s not from Salzillo, who the hell is it…’».
For whatever reasons, Cristóbal Belda did not authenticate it, and Ballester forgot about it, putting the pieces back in their display cases. But, for the series of portraits of him as a social mosaic of the Murcia that has survived the pandemic, the director of the Salzillo Museum stopped by his studio in La Alberca a few days ago. «I showed him both things, and he told me that the sketch could be Salzillo’s, because it has the same invoice, and when he saw the Virgin he remained as serious as he was, looking at her, without speaking, and said: ‘Juan, it’s the Immaculate’ . How the Purisima? If this man told me [Alonso Rubio, el vendedor] that it was a Dolorosa that was in Santa Catalina. By saying that it was the Purisima de Salzillo destroyed in 1931, both she and I have begun to investigate and compare old photographs and I have been able to carry out an identification study, police type, and there is no doubt, “confirms Juan Ballester.
«Only three or four photographs of the original piece remain, and it was considered by Salzillo to be a masterpiece. It has a very classic air. The face is life-size, and it has merit because it is not an interpretation that Carmen Sánchez made, but a cast, and in sculpture when a cast is made it is an original. We have, therefore, an original.
«Art has its times, its paths, it seeks its route»
What Francisco Sánchez Araciel’s daughter did with the Immaculate Conception of Salzillo is a cast: “He took it out in plaster, and later gave it a wax patina,” explains Juan Ballester. «The beautiful story here is that a series of ups and downs and strange circumstances and things make it appear almost a hundred years later this destroyed image of Salzillo in 1931. Art has its times, its paths, it is not in a hurry, it looks for its route”, affirms the collector. As if that were not enough, when Ballester was in the living room of his house with the director of the Salzillo Museum, María Teresa Marín, he showed her an Immaculate Conception in bronze, “and she tells me that this is also it.” According to the photographer, that other bronze Immaculate Conception is “an interpretation of the Immaculate Conception of Salzillo made by Clemente Cantos (1893-1955) in the 1930s. I have obtained the original in clay and my bronze, which we made from the original in clay ». The original clay piece, which belongs to an uncle of Ballester, Francisco Pérez Beltrán, “my uncle told me that Juan González Moreno gave it to him.” Even more strange, since it turns out that there is not so much work in Murcia by Clemente Cantos. The exhibition that the Salzillo Museum opens today (7:00 p.m.) consists of four pieces, in addition to a series of prints, postcards and photographs that have been obtained of what remains of the missing Immaculate Conception of Salzillo.
Ballester has no doubt that the cast of Carmen Sánchez Giner, daughter of the sculptor Araciel, is a copy of the original image of Salzillo. “What is the difference with old photographs? That Salzillo’s image was polychrome. And the casting of Carmen is monochrome».
The Araciel family is key in this story, as the director of the Salzillo Museum recalls that this saga of sculptors also owned other models of the great Baroque artist, sold in 1927 to the Provincial Museum, today in the Salzillo Museum. The small sketch of the Christ could not have been part of that lot sold to the museum, Ballester indicates, because it was broken, very destroyed. It was restored, under her commission, by the restorer Mari Paz Barbero.
#Salzillo #Museum #puts #enigma #missing #Immaculate #Conception
Leave a Reply