Since a few days ago in the Prado Museum you can visit a chapel that no longer exists. The Herrera Chapel, as it was called, was part of the church of Santiago de los Españoles, in Rome, until 1833, when the risk of ruin that threatened the integrity of the temple forced its dismantling. Now, the Madrid art gallery has reconstructed it on its premises, with an important part of the original frescoes by Carracci that served as ornamentation.
Although this is not the first time that these works have been exhibited to the public – since they were already the subject of a major exhibition in 2022 – what is new is the way in which it has been done: with an architectural montage designed by Francisco Bocanegra that allows the frescoes to be contemplated just as they were conceived and installed.
In total there are seven frescoes created between 1602 and 1605 by Annibale Carracci and some of his collaborators -such as Francesco Albani- that narrate episodes from the life of St. Diego de Alcalá and make up “an exceptional group of Italian Baroque“, in the words of the museum.
The chapel was commissioned by the Palencia banker Juan Enriquez de Herrera, who wanted to dedicate it to this saint as a token of gratitude for an alleged “miraculous intercession” to cure his son.
The frescoes of Carracci, between Madrid and Barcelona
The seven frescoes in the Prado Museum’s collection are not all that were in the chapel: when the time came to dismantle the original chapel, part of the pieces traveled to Madrid and the other part – the bulk of the work – was moved to Barcelona in 1851. To this day, nine of them are preserved in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
Back in the capital, these frescoes can be seen in room 4 of the Museo Nacional del Prado along with other works by those who painted them and their closest circle, such as Ludovico Carracci, Guido Reni and Domenichino.