In 1904, the Convent of San Francisco in Cuéllar, Spain collapsed, burying more than just stone and mortar. Under the rubble lay a masterpiece of early Spanish Renaissance sculpture—the alabaster funerary complex commissioned by Beltrán de la Cueva, the powerful first Duke of Alburquerque.
While art and antiquities dealer Lionel Harris sold two intact tombs from the complex to New York’s Hispanic Society, the rest of the ensemble vanished into thin air. Or so it seemed.
On Monday, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that missing fragments of the funerary complex had been found in a local garbage dump. In an extraordinary tale of cultural recovery, Maite Sánchez, Cuéllar’s councilor for culture since 2009, has spearheaded efforts to retrieve pieces of the ducal tomb from other pedestrian locations, including a soccer field, a pine forest, and even hidden in warehouse pallets.
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The discovery carries particular significance because the tomb includes work by Vasco de la Zarza, a pioneer of Renaissance sculpture in the Spanish region of Castile. Ismael Mont, of the University of Salamanca, told El Pais that these fragments are “among the earliest Renaissance sculptures in Spain,” making them invaluable to art historians tracking the evolution of Spanish artistry from Gothic to Renaissance styles.
The fate of the funerary complex echoes Spain’s complicated relationship with its heritage, where many pieces are now in prestigious museums abroad, while other treasures have suffered humiliating fates at home, repurposed or discarded as architectural fashions and economic priorities shifted. The convent itself was converted into a flour mill before its partial collapse.
Meanwhile, the parts of the tomb on view in the Hispanic Society of New York have been referred to as “star pieces” of that collection by Patrick Lenaghan, a curator at the institution.