Exhibition of Liturgical Vestments and Precious Metalwork

National Archaeological Museum, 1941

The archive of the National Archaeological Museum contains 311 catalogue cards for silver objects including in the Exhibition of Liturgical Vestments and Precious Metalwork. The show was organised by the Office for the Defence of National Artistic Heritage in 1941 and was held in the galleries formerly dedicated to American Archaeology at the National Archaeological Museum.Salto de línea

The idea for this exhibition came about when the Art Recovery Service took charge of the items which, though not part of the MAN collection, had been entrusted to the museum for safekeeping during the Spanish Civil War. The show was organised in the context of a more general process of identifying and returning collections to their rightful owners, but it also aimed to underscore the importance of displaying pieces of “great artistic and documentary interest for the History of Art”, as stated in the foreword to the exhibition guide.Salto de línea

To commemorate this exhibition, the cards have been digitised and catalogued to make them available to researchers. A document has been prepared with the catalogue numbers and certain details about the catalogued items: the Access Guide . To make the pieces easier to locate, this document follows the show’s original itinerary from Galleries I to VI and indicates the number assigned to each object in the exhibition guide.Salto de línea

The MAN has made the original Guide to the Exhibition of Liturgical Vestments and Precious Metalwork available to the public. It has also revived the memory of some of the individuals who worked on that show, such as the Inspector-General of Museums, Joaquín María de Navascués , and the MAN curators Emilio Camps Cazorla and Felipa Niño Más , whose biographies can be found on this page.

Access the catalogue

Photographs of the exhibitionSalto de línea