Spanish police have recovered a 16th-century musical manuscript that was stolen in the late 1980s from the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a World Heritage-listed Renaissance complex near Madrid.
As reported by the Police on Monday, the recovered piece is a page from the hymns of the collection of 221 choral books that King Philip II (1556-1598) ordered to be made for the monastery and which was made by different book writers, miniaturists and bookbinders. of the time.
The recovered parchment sheet comes from the choir of the monastery’s basilica and contains inscriptions in Gothic script and musical notations, according to a police statement.
Specifically, it corresponds to folio 8 of the Cantoral 140, which is made up of 58 paginated pages and three unpaginated ones, these with the Veni Creator, a Christian hymn in Latin.
The piece was allegedly stolen by students from the MarÃa Cristina Royal University Center, a teaching entity based in this complex, and was owned by a person in the Spanish region of Murcia.
The Police handed it over to the Royal Library of the monastery, a 16th-century complex that Felipe II ordered to be built and which includes in its more than 33,000 square meters dependencies such as the pantheon of the kings of Spain.
