The story
Among the treasures of a seminary museum in Valencia is a manuscript Thomas More wrote in the Tower of London, in the months before his execution in 1535. It is his own heavily corrected draft of De Tristitia Christi, On the Sadness of Christ, and it breaks off unfinished. It belonged to Juan de Ribera, archbishop of Valencia for 42 years and titular Patriarch of Antioch, who placed it in the college he founded in 1583.
That college, the Royal College Seminary of Corpus Christi, is still known in the city simply as the Patriarca, after him. Ribera was a leading churchman of the Counter-Reformation, and the complex he built around a Renaissance church and cloister still houses his college. The museum occupies part of it and shows paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries alongside Flemish panels and manuscripts.
The best-known pictures are by El Greco, the Cretan painter who settled in Toledo. Here are his Adoration of the Shepherds, Saint Francis and Brother Leo meditating on death, and an Allegory of the Camaldolese Order, a Benedictine order of hermit monks. Juan de Juanes, the Valencian Renaissance master, is well represented too. In the church next door, the Last Supper painted by Francisco Ribalta, a Valencian Baroque painter, still stands over the high altar it was made for.
