Title

Panels from Tomb of Beltrán de la Cueva, duke of Alburquerque, from San Francisco, Cuéllar

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Object history

The rich funerary collection of the 1st Duke of Alburquerque and his family in the convent church of San Francisco de Cuéllar is scattered in various national and international institutions. These panels come from the tomb of Beltrán de la Cueva, 1st Duke of Alburquerque, whose burial was located together with that of his first and third wife, in front of the main altar of the church. In the Hispanic Society of America, New York, the mural tombs of Bishop Don Gutierre de la Cueva (d. 1469), brother of Beltrán de la Cueva (d. 1492), and that of Doña Mencía Enríquez de Toledo (d. 1479), second wife of the duke, are preserved; they were acquired by Archer Milton Huntington from the British antiquarian Lionel Harris.

When Harris, founder of the London antiquities gallery The Spanish Art Gallery, bought these tombs, the monastery had long been in progressive deterioration. First came the French invasion and the War of Independence, a period in which the choir stalls and other works of the temple perished, used as firewood by the French troops. After the ecclesiastical disentailment of 1835, the monastery, patronage of the Duke of Alburquerque, was of special esteem for the town of Cuéllar, which is why the municipality tried to block the first auction and try to maintain the monument. In any case, its ruin was progressive, in 1876 the conventual dependencies were sold to Francisco García Minguela and the church in 1886 fell into the hands of the Duke of Sesto, heir to the title of Alburquerque. The nobleman sold the two mural tombs of Gutierre de la Cueva and Mencía Enríquez to Lionel Harris in 1905, and they were acquired by Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society, in 1906 (Lenaghan, 2015). The British antiquarian had to fragment the burial mounds in order to obtain a better product with their sale, which is why fragments are scattered in different institutions.

This funerary group of the Alburquerque family was still at the head of the temple when Harris took possession of a large part of it. The tombs of Gutierre de la Cueva and Mencía Enríquez were arranged in the arms of the transept, on both sides of the presbytery, while the tomb of the 1st Duke of Alburquerque, together with those of Mencía de Mendoza (d. 1476) and María de Velasco (d. 1508) - his first and third wife respectively - formed a free-standing funerary monument and were located in front of the steps of the main altar. These fragments, now in Rhode Island, would correspond to the Duke's tomb.

Such a sale marked the dispersion of the burial mounds of the Alburquerque family, since nowadays, apart from these plaques conserved in the Rhode Island School for Design, Providence (Rhode Island), in the Hispanic Society of America, the tombs of don Gutierre and doña Mencía Enríquez de Toledo are preserved. Some remains remained in Cuéllar, and were rescued during the debris removal of the nave of the church by the Workshop School that worked there, others are distributed among the Museum of Valladolid, the Cathedral Museum of Segovia or the Frederic Marès Museum in Barcelona. In the latter museum is preserved an angel that must have been part of the body of the tomb of Don Beltrán de la Cueva, the servant of Enrique IV of Castile. It seems that this piece came from the collection of the Duke of Infantado, where it was part of a heraldic composition (Marcos Villán, 1998: 203-204). Other decorative pieces from the architectural complex of San Francisco de Cuéllar are found in the Castle of Viñuelas (Madrid) and even in the reconstruction of the monastery of Sacramenia in Miami (Florida).

The debate about the authorship of this excellent funerary complex has been intense among scholars. Manuel Gómez-Moreno considered that they could be assigned to Vasco de la Zarza, an opinion held by his daughter María Elena Gómez-Moreno. Gilman Proske, for his part, attributed the tumuli to two different workshops, the first from Burgos and the second from Toledo. Later, in a detailed study on the tombs of San Francisco de Cuéllar in which he traced the dispersed parts of the same one, Marcos Villán, made known the payment made in 1498 for the set of the five effigies, although the document did not reveal the authorship. The aforementioned researcher considered it more likely that the workshop in Burgos executed the set, in the manner of Gil de Siloé, but without the sumptuousness of the creations of this master; he also saw the probable intervention of Vasco de la Zarza or someone close to his work (Marcos Villán, 1998, pp. 199-220). Although other scholars, such as Ruiz-Ayucar, have shown doubts regarding the possible intervention of Vasco de la Zarza. From the revealing study of Marcos Villán, Lenaghan, more recently, raised the hypothesis of a project carried out in two or three campaigns, in the course of which stylistic changes were evidenced. In any case, no documentation regarding authorship has been found to date, which means that the assignment of such works is still in the realm of hypothesis. This latest study by Patrick Lenaghan has been interesting not only for recapitulating the entire history of the ensemble, the debates on authorship, and his proposals in this regard, but also for showing a digital reconstruction of what this main chapel of San Francisco de Cuéllar must have looked like with the funerary ensemble that more than a century ago left its original site (Lenaghan, 2015, pp. 379-402).

Locations

• 1525 - 1905

  convent

  Convent of San Francisco, Cuéllar, Cuéllar (Spain)

• 1905

  dealer/antiquarian

  The Spanish Art Gallery, London, London (United Kingdom) *

• Unknown date

  private collection

  Eliza Radeke, Mrs. Gustav Radeke *

• present

  museum

  Rhode Island School of Art Museum of Art. Providence. Rhode Island (United States)