Voces del Prado

The Transfiguration of Our Lord, by Penni. The work dictates what it needs

George Bisacca, Restorer, 1985-Up to date

It’s an enormous picture. When we took it off the wall, with 20 people helping and machinery, we weighed the picture with the frame and it weighed 558 kilos (out of the frame it weighed about 300 kilos). The picture had of course a very strange history, because it was mostly painted in Italy; little is known about it, but it seems that it may have been painted in Rome, or possibly Naples; and then there’s evidence that it may have been moved to the island of Ischia, where Penni maybe finished the picture. It’s not known exactly if bringing it to Ischia or bringing it to Madrid is when they made the decision to cut it in half across the middle. Because it was so big and so heavy, that in order to transport it, they decided to cut it in half. When it was rejoined, they didn’t do a perfect job, and so there were some level differences on the front.
Because the boards are so thick (they’re 4 centimeters thick), so you don’t have any chance of changing the curve that they have. So, because of that, you have the choice either to make a perfect level in the middle or perfect level at the edge. But you can’t make a perfect level all the way across. Instead, we limited ourselves to the extremities, top and bottom, and we did a very complicated thing of removing these cross pieces and repairing all the splits, and then making the upper and lower cross members turning them into spring-activated cross pieces that could allow movement, whereas that center part was stable and we decided to leave that alone. So, the treatment that we finally ended up executing turned out to be very different from what we had planned. But this is one of those cases where you have to just let the work dictate what it needs.