The Museum of the Royal Mint of Madrid is not only peculiar because it specializes in the history of money and because, despite its free entry, it is the only museum owned by the Ministry of Finance. It is also because, as its director, Rafael Feria, recalled yesterday, its collections have multiplied since the 18th century, acquiring collection after collection, which has led them to even house the wax originals of the lions of the Cortes.
They are interested in collecting, and when they learned that “one of the largest private collections in the State was celebrating its centenary,” they wanted to pay tribute to it with a selection of some of its most important works. The collection – “the best in Spain, because the collecting environment that exists in Catalonia at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th is not found in other areas of the country,” said Feria – is the one that Miquel began to found. Mateu in 1923 after acquiring the Peralada castle and now until the end of September a hundred of his exceptional pieces – painting, capitals, glass and incunabula – illuminate the Mint.
Dazzling pieces that occupy four rooms for which the environments in which they are exhibited in the Carme convent, which is part of the medieval castle complex, have been evoked. Spaces such as its cloister or its refectory, which houses 2,500 pieces of exquisite glass from Pharaonic Egypt to the 19th century and of which, among other wonders, are shown in Madrid two fabulous glass jars, male and female, from the 18th century, which were given as gifts at weddings to symbolize the separation of property that governed the Crown of Aragon: if there was separation, each person took their own.
The chapels of the convent church are also recreated, housing paintings such as the bleeding Christ tied to the column by Hans Memling, now in Madrid, and its library, with more than 100,000 copies. Including incunabula such as Ptolemy’s La Cosmographie, which portrays the known world until 1482, and five thousand Cervantes copies, including a thousand editions of Don Quixote in 33 languages, of which one illustrated by Dalí, harquebus in hand, and another from Japan by the thirties with a Don Quixote drawn as a samurai by the traditional artist Serizawa Keisuke in such a way that it seems like the most innovative current comic.
An audiovisual opens the exhibition explaining the castle as the place where a museum was created – the exhibition is titled Collecting: genesis of museums, curated by Susana García and Garbiñe López – and reviews the history of Peralada, of the Rocabertí family, counts of the town –of them there are portraits such as The Countess of Peralada surrounded by her children, one of them, in black and the only one who does not touch her, now deceased– and of the formation of the enormous collection generated by Miquel Mateu –son of Damià Mateu, founder of Hispano Switzerland – since the acquisition of the castle in 1923. A collection that the Suqué-Mateu family has maintained and expanded since 1987 with the Peralada Festival, which for the exhibition makes the leap to Madrid with a lyrical recital by the soprano Serena Sáenz on June 18 in the museum auditorium.
