U.S. curator discovers unknown piece by Velazquez at Yale

Washington.- A remodeling project at the Yale University art museum led John Marciari, then the institution’s curator of European painting, to a large, damaged canvas of unknown origin.

The striking quality of the work spurred a quest to identify the painter and at first even Marciari found it hard to accept his finding that the artist had to have been Diego Velazquez (1599-1660).

“I told myself that I must be crazy. I spent six months trying to convince myself the painter was someone else,” the expert tells Efe in an interview.

His theory about the origin of “The Education of the Virgin,” expounded in the latest edition of Spain’s Ars Magazine, has rocked the art world.

Marciari, now curator of the Italian and Spanish collections at the San Diego Museum of Art, said the work is “incredibly important” because it is one of the Spaniard’s first paintings.

He estimates it was completed around 1617, when the painter was around 18 years old. “It was when Velazquez was becoming Velazquez. Nothing like it has ever been found,” Marciari said.

But the curator’s article is really just the first salvo in a debate among experts over whether the painting truly is the work of the Spanish master.

Some have received the article positively. Enrique Valdivieso, a professor at Seville University, said there is a “strong possibility” the painting is the work of the Spanish artist, while the director of the Velazquez Center, Benito Navarrete, described the find as “very important.”

Marciari’s contact with Spanish experts has been limited to sending a photo of the work to Velazquez expert Salvador Salort-Pons and asking him to guess the artist.

His response was “I’m shaking. Where did you find it?” the American said.

Like hundreds of other works of unknown origin by famous artists, “The Education of the Virgin,” which shows a young Virgin Mary learning to read, ended up in a basement alongside another 250 European paintings.

Marciari came across the painting in 2003, when he was the Yale University Art Gallery’s associate curator of early European art, during a transfer of the museum’s collection to a storage facility while renovation work was carried out at its main building.

Velazquez’s name became lodged in his head and Marciari took on the role of sleuth and began tracking the painting’s origin.

He discovered that it had been donated to the university’s art department in 1925 by brothers Henry and Raynham Townshend, two Yale students whose father was a merchant mariner who frequently traveled between the Mediterranean and New England.

That year, the two brothers inherited a big Neo-Gothic house from their grandfather and probably hung the painting there.

“It was probably a painting that their father had brought from Spain,” Marciari said.

He believes the work was commissioned for Seville’s Carmelita de Santa Ana Convent, where it was part of the altar until a flood in 1626 in which the painting suffered serious damage that is still visible today.

An analysis of the work’s pigments and materials “show with near certainty that it was painted in Seville prior to 1620,” Marciari said.

For now, the painting is being attributed to an unidentified artist from the 17th century Spanish school.

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