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As the person responsible for the restoration studio, Manuela [Mena] began to request that they produced reports on their procedures. This was the start of the work that has involved the greatest personal effort on my part at the Museum. We realised that reports of this type had never been produced. They didn’t exist. We didn’t have reports. There wasn’t a restoration report archive.
So I mentioned to Manuela that the Prado didn’t have a restoration archive and that we were going to start producing reports, we ought to create an archive. She put me in charge of it. I thus started to create the restoration archive that now exists, and during the entire time I was working with her I was also entrusted with supervising the restorers, making sure that they were communicating everything they had done during the past year etc. As time passed I continued to pay close attention to it and when consulting the General Archive I had realised that every now and then I found information about previous restorations. While what had actually been done was rarely stated, it was recorded when a painting had been relined or had been restored, sometimes it said “varnished”, or sometimes “colour reintegration”. But very brief information. So I quietly devoted myself to this. Really, very few people knew what I was doing but it’s something you don’t take up one day and leave the next as it’s no use whatsoever if you don’t really focus on it and start doing it systematically. It was an intensive job as really it was only when I re-examined the entire General Archive that I obtained a clear idea of what material would be useful for the restoration archive as a whole. And given that I’m a patient person I could wait for the reports to be completed.
It was Gabriele [Finaldi] who encouraged me to undertake the project that I’m now working on with my colleague María [García] for the Bicentenary, which is a book on the history of restoration at the Museo del Prado. We are working really hard on it and it’s what we are currently occupied with. It will be the work that I leave behind here at the Prado.
She joined the Museum as typist and secretary to the directors, then going on to the Documentation and Archives Area in 1973, where she is responsible for the systematic filing of reports from the Restoration workshop, among other duties.
Interview recorded on May 03, 2018
