MERRY DEL VAL, Rafael Cardinal (1908)

The sitter was born 10 October 1865 as Rafael María José Pedro Francisco Borja Domingo Gerardo de la Santíssima Trinidad Merry del Val y Zulueta at the Spanish Embassy in London the second of the four sons of Rafael Carlos Merry del Val. His mother was Sofia Josefa de Zulueta (died 1925), elder daughter of Pedro José de Zulueta, count of Torre Díaz, of the London bank of Zulueta & Co., and his wife, Sophia Ann Wilcox, who was of Scottish and Dutch ancestry. The Zuluetas were an old Basque family ennobled as counts de Torre Díaz in the nineteenth century. The del Vals were an Aragonese family, claiming descent from a twelfth-century Breton crusader; the surname Merry came from a line of Irish merchants from County Waterford who settled in the late eighteenth century in Seville.

Merry del Val lived in England until 1878. He was ordained a priest on 30 December 1888, after receiving a doctorate in philosophy in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 1891 he became a privy chamberlain and member of the Pontifical family, having served as a secretary in nunciatures. In 1902 he was the papal representative to the coronation of King Edward VII accompanied by Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII.

Before becoming a cardinal, he served as the secretary of the papal conclave of 1903 that elected Pope Pius X who is said to have accepted his election through Merry del Val’s encouragement. Pius X later appointed him Pontifical Secretary of State where he served from 1903 to 1914. After the death of Pope Benedict XV in 1922, who preferred Pietro Gasparri to be Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val was retained by Pope Pius XI in the role of Secretary of the Holy Office, a post he held from 1914 until 26 February 1930, when he died in the Vatican aged 64, during an operation for appendicitis.

Bibliography:

Frances Alice Monica Forbes, Rafael, Cardinal Merry del Val, A Character Sketch, 1932

John Patrick Carroll Abbing, Cardinal Merry del Val, 1937

Marie Cecilia Buehrle, Rafael, Cardinal Merry del Val, 1957.

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The replica Merry del Val commissioned for himself was painted not in 1907 but in 1908 (and may actually have been copied from the first in New York – as was probably the portrait of Pope Pius X intended for the Archbishop in New York – but shipped to Rome when the artist was going to Rome for the presentation of his 1907 portrait of Pope Pius X). In the artist’s papers is a letter dated July 22, 1908 from an assistant to Merry del Val (the letter is unsigned though on Vatican stationery) stating that ‘…the portrait was delivered in good condition.’ Though this could refer to the ‘lost’ picture of his mother (not catalogued here), it probably refers to his own portrait. This was mentioned in the New York Herald, Monday, September 7, 1908.