Voces del Prado

The Coronation of the Virgin by Velázquez: An Enigma Resolved

Gabriele Finaldi, Assistant Director of Conservation and Research, 2002-2015

In our capacity as art historians working at museums, we have ongoing contact with the works; we are very close to them and we look at them a great deal. We see them during their restoration, which is when you see the work stripped, you see how it is constructed. We also have the opportunity to talk to our colleagues at the Technical Documentation Department and to the restorers themselves. At the Museum we have the opportunity to x-ray the works, which gives us much more information than you can actually see on the surface. Then it’s also a question of training the eye, given that the eye has to become accustomed to picking up significant things, important things. In this manner we gradually learn and are able to contribute something from what we have seen and what we have learned.
I recall, for example, when we were working on the exhibition entitled “Velázquez’s Fables” [2007]. I had to write something about Velázquez’s The Coronation of the Virgin. It has always seemed a strange painting to me due to its dimensions and the size of the figures. Velázquez tended to paint figures to a natural size, and here we are dealing with a scale of two-thirds. We knew that this painting formed part of a series of works that were believed to be lost, a series of works on the life of the Virgin. In the early years I used to spend quite a lot of time reviewing the collections, especially those in store, in order to see what we had. The collections at the Prado are not entirely catalogued, which is to say, you can still come across quite a few surprises. And I came across a series of works that could have been attributed to an artist I had studied, a Veronese painter who had worked in Rome during the 17th century known as Alessandro Turchi, who went under the nickname “L'Orbetto Veronés” or “The Blind Veronese”. He was an artist I was interested in, since I had already written about him. And suddenly I come across various works by him in the Museum’s storerooms, although the works had not been officially attributed to him. Then, when I reviewed the themes of these pictures, all of which were based on the life of Mary, and after checking the size of the works, I thought: “Could these not be the pictures that made up the series completed by Velázquez with The Coronation of the Virgin?”. I immediately noted down the measurements and asked for the pictures to be taken up to the halls where we could see them alongside Velázquez’s work. And there we had our answer! This was the series of works that had been painted for the Queen’s Oratory at the former Alcázar de Madrid and that Velázquez had completed with The Coronation of the Virgin. Not all the works had been preserved, but we possessed a number of them. That whole mystery had suddenly been resolved and, what is more, with works belonging to the Museum itself! The Prado has given us quite a few surprises of this kind!