The mystery of the painting’s whereabouts started to unravel when the curator of a gallery in Helsinki spotted a plaque at a museum in the Spanish city of Córdoba.
A painting by the Spanish Baroque artist Antonio del Castillo y Saavedra (1616–1668), which was thought to have been lost for hundreds of years, has been discovered on display at the Villa Gyllenberg Art Museum in Helsinki.
The artwork, entitled Saint Peter Martyr, was painted sometime between 1650 and 1655 as part of a series depicting saints that originally belonged to the Dominican monastery of San Pablo in Córdoba, southern Spain.
The painting has been missing since around 1830, when the Spanish state sold the monastery’s properties and confiscated its assets. The San Pablo series, which includes 10 paintings in total, was broken up and was believed for centuries to have been lost.
According to Finnish news agency STT, Villa Gyllenberg’s Chief Curator Lotta Nylund was on holiday in Andalusia last year when she spotted a plaque at the Fine Arts Museum in the city of Córdoba which read: “Saint Peter Martyr – location unknown”.
“I think I know where this lost work is located,” Nylund tells STT of her thoughts at the time. “When I got home, I compared the measurements of the works and read all the research literature, and it started to look more and more likely that the painting at Villa Gyllenberg is actually one of the missing parts of the Córdoba series.”
Further research confirmed her suspicions, and collaboration between the two museums led to Castillo expert José María Palencia Cerezo travelling to Helsinki to confirm the work was part of the San Pablo series.
Finnish art collector Ane Gyllenberg purchased the painting from a gallery in London in 1934. An exhibition of Gyllenberg’s collection — including the once-lost Saint Peter Martyr — will open at Villa Gyllenberg on 15 October.
