Lisbon's Santa Casa da Misericordia has signed a deal to bail out the Ricardo Espírito Santo Foundation whose Museum of Decorative Arts in Lisbon suffered a catastrophic fall in income and loss of security when Grupo Espírito Santo went under in 2014.
Pedro Santana Lopes, the head of Santa Casa da Misericordia de Lisboa, commented, "Now we are looking towards the future."
On behalf of Santa Casa da Misericordia, Lopes last Friday signed an agreement with Conceição Amaral, the president of the Ricardo Espírito Santo Silva Foundation.
This agreement firms up the "the socio-economic viability" of the foundation established in 1953 as a museum and school dedicated to the decorative arts.
The original banker and collector who established the foundation is the grandfather of disgraced banker Ricardo Salgado under whose management the Espírito Santo empire collapsed in 2014 amid astonishing levels of debt and accusations of corruption and poor management.
One of the purposes of the deal is to ensure "funding that guarantees the continuation of the activities of the Foundation which has been facing serious difficulties since the summer of 2014.”
The Foundation runs workshops, the Superior School of Decorative Arts and the Institute of Arts and Crafts which now will undergo restructuring as defined by Amaral at the end of last year.
The Ricardo Espírito Santo Foundation, also known as the Museum of Decorative Arts was established in April, 1953 under the Ministry of Culture.
The building is at Largo das Portas do Sol in Lisbon. The Museum is a permanent cultural institution established in the service of society and its development, is a non-profit organisation and is open to the public.
The primary purpose of the museum is the protection, study and dissemination of Portuguese decorative arts and crafts, the maintenance of their traditional features and public education.
Alongside the museum are workshops where artisans reproduce antiques and practice traditional crafts like gilding, wood-carving, and bookbinding
The foundation is named after Ricardo Espirito Santo (1900-1955), who in 1947 bought the C17th Azurara Palace in which to store just part of his huge collection of furniture, textiles, silverware and ceramics .
The Azurara Palace was restored, with the help of the architect Raul Lino, as an aristocratic house of the eighteenth century.
