They didn’t know who it could be and they called him the sorrowful one, because of his afflicted attitude, alone, his downcast gaze and his head buried in his right hand. And so it has remained, lost for a century in one of those black holes in the history of art, until an intervention carried out in 2013 in the church of Sant Climent de Taüll, from whose walls the figure had been torn, put the right track for the restorers of the MNAC. The saddened man was none other than the fratricidal Cain, apparently repentant, who finally returns to his original location, one of the triumphal arches of the Taüll apse, to the right of God’s hand.
“We are going to have to reissue the postcards that we sell in stores because the apse has changed,” the MNAC curator Eduard Vallès joked yesterday in front of one of the most representative icons of European Romanesque art, where two restorers were standing on scaffolding. the last touches The Taüll apse is to the Museu Nacional what Las Meninas is to the Prado. Its Sistine Chapel. The frescoes were uprooted in 1920 by the Catalan Museum Board due to the danger that they would be looted and sold abroad. The works were entrusted to the team of the Italian Franco Stefanoni, master of the strappo technique (pull in Italian), which he had developed to safeguard Italian heritage during World War I. But when in 1923 they were installed in the Museu de la Ciutadella, Cain woke up in front of poor Lázaro, both arranged in a very different way from how the Maestro de Taüll had conceived them.
Already in the Palau Nacional, the new headquarters of the museum from 1934, the arch of the apse was installed with the hand of God in the center but without Cain, who was sent to the reserves until 1995, when he appeared in the room of Sant Climent presented in isolation as if it were a painting. Recomposing the puzzle has not been easy. Some fragments discovered and restored already into the 21st century, such as the scene of Cain and Abel or the figure of Sant Climent, are kept in the church of Taüll. It was there, carrying out a tracing on some vestiges of paint, that it was possible to be certain of its location. In fact, in the mapping that since 2013 projects a 10-minute animation on the apse of the church that reproduces the entirety of the original fresco with all its details and figures, the grieving Cain already appears.
“It’s as if we reached the finish line, after a very long distance race in which many people have been involved,” says the head of the museum’s restoration and preventive conservation service, Carme Ramells, for whom it is also of vital importance, both for the knowledge of the creative process of the paintings, as well as for their conservation, the analysis of more than forty samples.
Through the microscope, for example, it has been possible to verify that the master followed the instructions of medieval painting treatises to the letter, that the chromatic range is much wider than previously believed or that, once Once the paintings were torn off, a mixture of lime, cheese and milk was used to adhere them to the transfer fabrics. The formula was perfect for achieving adhesion of the paintings, but it makes them extremely vulnerable to changes in temperature and humidity, requiring museographic preservation conditions that make it impossible for them to return to the churches of origin.
Those who visit the MNAC from today will be able to contemplate the imposing pantocrator now without the scaffolding, which will be reassembled in front of the Sant Pere del Burgal and Sant Joan de Boi complexes. In the first, the Romanesque conservator, Gemma Illa, advances, two prophets will be moved to another location and a fragment of a border that had never been seen before will be incorporated, while in the Boà one four decorative fragments that were located on the columns will be reinstated of the church.
