Voces del Prado

Restoration of The Garden of Earthly Delights

Pilar Silva Maroto, Head of the Department of Conservation of Flemish Painting and the Northern Schools up to 1700, 1997-2017

Undoubtedly the most extensive and most important restoration that took place when I joined the Museum was The Garden of Earthly Delights. It was carried out by the Dávila sisters, Mayte and Rocío, who could work on it together. One of them was responsible for one side panel and the other sister for the other side panel; with the central panel they each worked on a half of the panel.
There was quite a to-do, given that it was such an important work and it had such an impact. The painting has become a worldwide icon, not just for the Western World, but for the world in general. First we staged a meeting to talk about the restoration criteria, including people from the Getty Museum and many other places. I’m not saying it was just for show, but we already had our criteria, and the meeting was organised really to tell everyone that we were going to carry out the restoration process with care. While we were carrying out the restoration itself, we were working alongside a Czech institution and we had a meeting with them in Valtice, in the Czech Republic. In the end, we were able to present the central panel at the exhibition on "Philip II" in 1998, here at the Museo del Prado, whilst our restorers were completing the restoration of the side panels. In the year 2000, when restoration of the work was complete and it was formally presented, this had an enormous impact in the media; for example, the newspaper, "La Razón", devoted its whole front page to us. To give you an idea of what this meant: having a work on the front page, at a time when the Prado’s relations with the press were not the best, was extremely important. A small exhibition was organised in the year 2000 on the restoration of The Garden of Earthly Delights, including the copies and the technical study. For the first time, we presented certain details of the infrared reflectography (because it hadn’t been carried out entirely), and we exhibited a physical example of the X-ray on a negatoscope, and we brought the tapestry from National Heritage [Patrimonio Nacional] and the copies that exist. This had such an impact, that we ran out of copies of the small catalogue immediately. Later on, we repeated the exhibition and Fernando Checa, the Director, declared “I think it’s amazing!”. Given that we didn’t have the technical resources we have now, we had placed details of the macros, the infrared reflectography and the technical materials on a series of panels. The Director said to me, “This is like being at school”, and I replied, “This isn’t school! It’s the only way we have to show people how we did it”. The exhibition had an enormous impact. Later on, when the project had matured and we were able to take advantage of the improved resources at our disposal, we presented this technical material at the "Hieronymus Bosch" exhibition in 2016, including the completed infrared reflectography process that had been carried out; we also used a computer to remove the clamp of the central panel so that the whole thing could be viewed perfectly. That was a later period, one that enabled us to discover much more, an increasing amount.