La creación de los museos de ambiente en Españala Casa y el Museo del Greco de Toledo

Zusammenfassung

The House and the Museum of El Greco was the first museum of environment which was opened in Spain in 1910. It ment an introduction to the new museology in Spain, widely spread in the anglo-saxon countries but completely unknown in ours. The project was born thanks to Benigno Vega Inclán, who was a dealer, owner and the helping hand both of the King Alfonso XIII and the historicist architect Eladio Laredo. Vega-Inclán was also an important collaborator of Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, an intellectual member of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, whose reasoned catalogue about the painter was the scientific base for the museuḿs assembly. But project not only deals with the artistic or museological aspects but it is focused on the actions which had been occured after the disaster of 1898. These actions had the main purpose of reconstructing and fixing the idea of Spanish nation through cultural projects and tourism. In the Museum of El Greco it is often thought of Spain according to the painter and his own works. El Greco acquired great importance in the city of Toledo, so it has pointed out a series of actions and the birth of new houses-museums that will take El Grecós House as prototype. Aims: The aim of this thesis is to reconstruct the history of such a singular institution from its origins until 2014, coinciding with the celebration of the IV Centenary of El Greco`s death. The principal hypothesis tries to demonstrate that the project of the House and the Museum of El Greco was the first museum of environment created in Spain in order to defend a national political project and, for that reason, the museum marked a breaktrough in the national and international museological actions during the first half of 20th century. Secondly, we have to consider the importance of this project in the city of Toledo and its contribution to the local economic development. Methodology and sources: We follow the traditional hypothetical - deductive method. We begin with the principal hypothesis of the work and it will be compared with the data processed in documentary and empirical sources, in order to check out or even to refute the hypothesis and aiming high to extract a conclusion. The principal sources consulted for the accomplishment are mainly archival and bibliographical, with the exception of a chapter dedicated to the museuḿs historical site, where archaeological sources have been taken into consideration. We must also add the direct study of the museuḿs collection, including its analytical and radiographic studies and the direct observation across the trip. Conclusions: Through the reconstruction of the history of the museum it is demonstrated that from the beginning of the 20th century the museum is going to be founded like an important item linked with the city of Toledo. Besides, it was the cultural exponent of the idea of the Spanish nation widely spreading across the Royal Office of Tourism to the institutions. Toledo finds a new and almost unique source of wealth in the earliest tourism around El Greco, which was stimulated by the Marquis of Vega-Inclán. The earliest times of the tourism in Toledo coincided with the beginning of the tourism in Spain and El Greco is the principal point that will settle the whole study. In this process there will be fundamental the figures of Vega Inclan and Cossío. The triangle between El Greco and both prominent figures is the best example to ilustrate the close relationship between intellectual heritage and its museological form, because Cossío's book took place through the building and the collections. The influence of the origins of the ILE and the european museological trends - the period rooms - created a new product unknown at least in Spain: the house-museum of environment. That is to say, the first cultural business of this country...