The exhibition “Royal treasures. Masterpieces from the Terra Sancta Museum” was inaugurated at the Museum of the Centro Gaiás of the City of Culture of Santiago on Thursday, 21 March
The exhibition
The exhibition – open from 22 March to 4 August, with entrance free of charge - is made up of a total of 108 pieces from Jerusalem, Lisbon and different museums in Galicia. These include the Museum of the Holy Land of Santiago de Compostela, which lent to the exhibition the model of the Holy Sepulchre, detailed both externally and internally, made by fra Bartolomé de las Heras. “It not only has an important aesthetic value but also a historical-documentary one,” the Custos of the Holy Land, fra Francesco Patton, present at the event, commented. “We can see what there was outside, but also what there was inside the Sepulchre, we can see things that there used to be in the Basilica and which are no longer there.”
Royal treasures
The exhibition, divided into three sections, accompanies us on a journey through the symbolic meaning of the city of Jerusalem and of the foundation of the Holy Sepulchre, to finish with the donations that various European royal households made to the Custody of the Holy Land over the centuries. Visitors can admire some works of art donated in the last 500 years by the main European royal houses to the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre: these signs show closeness and devotion to the Holy Places but are also a way of contributing financially to their maintenance. Part of this artistic treasure is made up of sumptuous pieces of gold and silver, ornaments, jewellery, codices, canopies, liturgical fabrics (dalmatics or chasubles) and other objects for worship such as chalices or crucifixes.
Historical bond
“There is a historical bond between Santiago de Compostela and Jerusalem,” the Custos said, “Especially as Santiago is, together with Rome and Jerusalem, one of the three main places of pilgrimage of Christianity. Furthermore, more than 200 friars, over the centuries, have left the Franciscan province of Santiago to serve in the Holy Land,” The Custos also recalled the famous Galician pilgrim Egeria, “thanks to whom we have brought many celebrations back to life again, which she had recorded in her diary but had disappeared over the centuries.”
The stopping points of the tour
Santiago will be the only Spanish stopping point of the exhibition, which has arrived after having been in Lisbon. “It is right that this itinerant exhibition stops in Santiago because Santiago was and is a place of pilgrimage and also for the contribution that the friars of the Franciscan province of Santiago have made to the Holy Land,” the apostolic nuncio in Spain, Mons. Bernardito Auza, said. “In addition, the most surprising and important treasures and donations in the exhibition come from Spanish monarchs,” he underlined. After the visit in Galicia, the exhibition will be on display in Florence and then in the United States.
María Díaz Ripoll
