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I’m a great Velázquez fan. When I came here I had a project funded by the Madrid Regional Government on royal collecting during the seventeenth century. Velázquez is my favourite painter, both the Velázquez of The Spinners and Las Meninas, as well as of Vulcan’s Forge. I wasn’t a restorer and I never had been. I don’t like to touch paintings, and I never touch them. But when they were preparing for the Velázquez Exhibition in 1990, they were bringing in paintings from outside and some of them had to be restored. One of them was St. Ildefonso Receiving the Chasuble from the Virgin from Seville, and I went to the workshop, where they were also restoring Vulcan’s Forge. I came across Rocío Dávila, one of the Dávila sisters who restored Las Meninas, The Spinners... Well Rocio was holding an iron, a huge great thing, and she was ironing out St. Ildefonso Receiving the Chasuble from the Virgin by Velázquez. I was absolutely taken aback because I’d never even thought that a Velázquez could be ironed.
Professor of the Department of Art, School of Geography and History, of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid; she worked as Head of the Departments of Spanish Painting (1100-1500) and of Flemish Painting and the Northern Schools up to 1700.
Interview recorded on October 18, 2017
