The murals from the 12th-century Vera Cruz de Maderuelo hermitage have lingered in obscurity for decades. At the start of the 20th century, the chapel was little more than a haystack.
The Prado transferred them to the museum after removing them from the wall to shield them from the Linares reservoir, which threatened to flood the sanctuary.
Their value is extraordinary, as they include one of the earliest known nude depictions of Adam and Eve.
In earlier times, the Linares reservoir often flooded the Linares valley in spring when drought had not yet dried Spain. There is a future day when Vera Cruz’s hermitage may itself be submerged in the beautiful walled town of Maderuelo, Segovia.
Outside the city walls, perched above the Riaza River, the single-nave church with its straight-fronted apse carries a remarkable tale with a fortunate ending shaped by a chain of coincidences. Yet it was not always so.
Abandoned for decades, the hermitage began a new life at the turn of the 20th century, serving as storage for hay and farm tools in place of a sacred space.
Its interior, however, preserves an authentic Romanesque treasure, including paintings that would become among the Prado Museum’s prized assets, long overlooked for many years.
“The moment we first recognized the value was 1907, when the interior of the hermitage yielded its secrets,” explains María López Villarejo, a painting restorer at a Madrid gallery.
The inner walls and vaults of the small sanctuary were adorned with frescoes from the twelfth century, representing some of the finest late medieval Spanish painting.
At the turn of the century, these paintings attracted antique dealers eager to profit by selling cultural heritage abroad, especially to the United States. They exploited the absence of clear preservation laws.
The church’s paintings depict various biblical scenes from the Old and New Testaments. The vault centers on a figure of Christ, crowned and surrounded by angels and saints. Cain and Abel with the Mystic Lamb, Adoration of the Magi, and the Creation of Adam and Eve are among the other themes represented.
As Villarejo notes, the Creation of Adam and Eve is particularly valuable because it is one of the earliest nude representations in history. “It is a very schematic depiction of human nudity,” she explains regarding some paintings later moved to the Prado Museum in 1947.
To understand the paintings’ fate, one must rewind to 1896, when Maderuelo’s parish priest sought permission from the Archdiocese to sell the hermitage to fund other churches in the city. José María Sadia, a journalist and heritage author, tells the full story in his book El románico español.
According to Sadia, the hermitage was sold to a town neighbor for 150 pesetas and then resold to a rancher and farmer named Raimundo Ruiz, who used the site as a barn and even kept a donkey there.
“The neighbors did not value the interior drawings; they thought they were old-fashioned. Children even tried to remove the paint with buckets, which later contributed to deterioration,” Sadia notes, though the paintings survived in remarkable condition.
By the 1920s, a Madrid antiques dealer offered 30,000 pesetas for the paintings, but a Segovia lawyer caught wind of the plan. The lawyer approached the priest, the mayor, and the owner, and the state quickly intervened by temporarily confiscating the keys and halting the sale, a dark moment in the era of art looting.
From 1924, the hermitage was officially listed as a Historic-Artistic Monument, but Prado initially hesitated to assume responsibility, deeming it impractical for the state to intervene.
Ultimately, the Prado acquired the works years later amid fears they could be damaged by the rising swamp. The price rose to 50,000 pesetas, a higher sum than initially requested.
Ramon Gudiol led the process of stabilizing and mounting the murals for transfer to Prado. López Villarejo notes that the project began in the sixth century and references Vitruvius’s discussion of removing frescoes from Pompeii. The practice grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, risking many artifacts.
The Vera Cruz mural restoration includes a technique known as a boot-style strap, where a final plaster and paint layer is removed. An organic adhesive, largely rabbit cartilage, is heated and applied, with strong cotton gauze placed atop. When dry, the paint is peeled away and the surface restored.
“The process transfers the artwork onto gauze and burlap with a water-soluble glue. To save the painting, the first gauze is removed with hot water,” explains the Prado restorer involved in the project. The panels were mounted on wooden frames with fabric-reinforced cross beams.
“In the end, it remains like a painting on canvas,” says López Villarejo, who supervised the 2010 restoration with a team of eight. The piece measures about five by four and a half meters, housed in room 51C on the museum’s ground floor in its original dimensions.
During restoration, the entire surface was cleaned and a stencil technique was used to remove repainting and recreate the stone’s texture. The work is in very good condition, though the kingly child figure once admired by monarchs is missing. It’s unclear whether the disappearance occurred when the chapel was abandoned or during an antiquarian sale, the restorer notes.
The hermitage’s later use as stables may have contributed to its loss, as a wall opening likely served as a ventilation shaft rather than a doorway.
Sadia emphasizes the paintings’ artistic value, noting connections to the Santa María de Taüll and Casillas de Berlanga complexes. The Romanesque painting expert highlights the heavenly scene as one of the most iconic images in Spanish Romanesque art.
Today, a well-made copy stands in the Maderuelo church, with sinopia remnants and traces of the original painting. Visitors can still see the head of the paintings and a reproduction on the right, mirroring the Prado version. This homage to the retreat was shaped by a fortunate chain of events that kept the masterpieces from ending up in the United States.