Alfonso Emilio Pérez Sánchez: Commitment and Love for the Museum

Rafael Alonso Alonso, Restorer, 1978-2016

Alfonso Emilio Pérez Sánchez was a person I strongly admired for his commitment and love for Museum. He was a tricky character because he said what he felt and didn’t mince words. If he had to tell you something, well then sometimes he did so in a brutal and even cruel manner. But it was the truth. And if he was wrong, as everyone is, then this was never because he was malicious, but because he was totally convinced of what he was saying. The worst thing was that his way of saying it was really quite brusque. Over the years, we had our problems and arguments with him. But this was only because he was looking out for the Museum and its collections and because he wanted to convey the legacy of don Diego Angulo and the tradition of the Museo del Prado. He knew everything. Once I was astonished because there were two painting curators at the Museum who were former students of his and, when we were unrolling a picture, he said to them, “let’s see, what is this?”. He asked them in front of us and in quite an emphatic manner, but they didn’t know what it was. “This is described by Angelino Pons in such-and-such a book and it came from such-and-such a place and such-and-such church”. He said things a very precise manner. He was talking about a series of immense paintings, pictures that could have been as big as 9 metres by 5 metres, something truly enormous, having come from the walls of the Church of La Trinidad. They’d been cut into fragments and were quite badly damaged. I remember that he’d never seen them, but he’d read about them and, as soon as he’d seen them, he’d recognised them. He was a walking archive, and he remembered everything. He linked one thing with another with admirable ease. I’ve never met anyone who managed to acquire such a comprehensive vision of painting and of the Museum. Well, perhaps Manuela Mena. But, in principle, Pérez Sánchez was an absolute point of reference, and I admired him enormously. And he had a professional appreciation from my colleagues and from me, especially. It was a sense of trust and mutual respect. I must acknowledge that he was always up to date with the latest developments and he helped us a great deal. He fought to save the Restoration Workshop and to set it up. But he demanded a great deal from himself and he demanded a lot from others.