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In 1978 a team was created in order to monitor the works that were deposited at different institutions. We didn’t form part of the Museum’s staff, but were paid by the Ministry of Education through the Academic and Technical Committee. All of this arose because of a formal complaint that had been presented by various extra-parliamentary parties during the time of the Director, José Manuel Pita Andrade, in which they denounced the fact that some 7,000 paintings had disappeared from the Museo del Prado, having been placed elsewhere. That was nonsense, among other reasons because even today, after so many acquisitions have been made since that time, we only have around eight thousand odd entries in the catalogue. However, the Office of the State Prosecutor, which was formerly called the Prosecutor of the Kingdom, agreed to investigate the complaint that was lodged by these extra-parliamentary parties and created a working committee whose mission was to go round all of the institutions in Madrid accompanied by two police officers allocated by the Prosecutor’s Office itself, which also appointed a special prosecutor to carry out the inquiry. And we drew up a record of everything we found and everything that was missing. The inquiry was implemented at a national level by the prosecutor himself who’d been appointed, who was called, José Raya, and he wrote to all of the institutions according to the lists of works in store that existed, and which we furnished him with. And, of course, it wasn’t the same being contacted by the prosecutor as by the Museo del Prado, which is why they all responded and sent photographs. We were a team of three people who worked on the committee, in addition to the policemen, all contracted by the Ministry. One was Mercedes Royo-Villanova and the other was Adela Espinós Díaz, who later went on to work at the Fine Arts Museum in Valencia. And Rocío Arnáez Pérez-Agote, who was the mother superior at the library at the time, also played a small part in the inquiry.
Conservator of the Museo del Prado since 1982. She began collaborating with the Museum in the 1970's, sorting documents and photographic archives. She documents and visits the depository institutions of works of the Museum, giving rise to the collection known as "Prado disperso" (Scattered Prado).
Interview recorded on April 08, 2018
