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Provenance Revealed: Silver from Toro, Spain (In-person)
Join experts from Spain and the UK as they uncover the dramatic story of a magnificent piece of Spanish silver in the V&A’s collection, and trace its journey through the tumultuous world of the early 1900s European art market.
The ‘Toro’ monstrance is an imposing silver structure that holds the consecrated host, an element central to the Catholic Mass. Made in 1538 for the church of Santa María in Toro, north-west Spain, it was part of the town’s spiritual heritage until the night of the 25th November 1890, when thieves stripped the building of all its valuables. On discovering the crime, parish priest Pedro Monforte Salazar wrote that he was ‘so stunned and distressed that I don’t know what has come over me’. Exactly 65 years later, this same monstrance passed into the V&A’s ownership.
The story of how this happened, and of what happened next, is the subject of this study day. Speakers include D. José Navarro Talegón, who made the connection between the theft and the museum, Martin Levy (Director, H. Blairman & Sons and member of the UK Government Spoliation Panel), and Jonathan Ruffer (philanthropist and founder of the Spanish Gallery, the first UK gallery devoted to the art of 16th and 17th century Spain).
Please note there will be simultaneous translation available from Spanish to English.
The V&A the Spanish Embassy in London, the Instituto Cervantes, London, and the Diocese of Zamora, for their support.
