De Fuentidueña a Manhattan

While the production and premiere of "Welcome Mr. Marshall" (Luis García Berlanga, 1953) was taking place, other distinguished North American representatives visited the small Segovian town of Fuentidueña with one objective: to acquire its Romanesque church of San Martín. The apse of the temple was an excellent construction suitable to complete one of the rooms of The Cloisters museum (the medieval art section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, erected thanks to John D. Rockefeller Jr.). The director of the aforementioned museum, James J. Rorimer (a member of the well-known US Army Monuments Men group during World War II), took up in 1952 an idea from 1935: to acquire and move to Manhattan that Spanish Romanesque apse. He then found optimal conditions to carry out an initiative that in the thirties turned out to be unfeasible. The new horizon was given by the Franco dictatorship, at a time when it was trying to break out of international isolation, counting on the support of the United States. How was it possible to export a national monument? That is the question that the pages of this book try to answer. Access to unpublished documentation, both in Spain and in the United States, has made it possible to reconstruct the episodes that took place until the signing of the agreement in 1957 and the final presentation of the monument in New York in 1961, as an absolutely exceptional assignment in the international arena. . The agents that promoted and facilitated the operation, the payments of various kinds that mediated the agreement, the formulas for circumventing the legislation, the strings pulled by public representatives and by respected members of the cultural elite, as well as the critical voices, constitute pieces key to a story that until now we were unaware of and had to be revealed.