Voces del Prado

The responsibility of curators

Manuela Mena Marqués, Head of the Department of Conservation of 18th Century Painting and Goya, 1978-2019

When a painting enters a restoration workshop, a period begins that can be quite long, one in which we carry out an in-depth analysis of what the artist has done. This helps us to learn more. And very often our pre-conceived ideas are changed. In a museum such as ours, we must adapt to these changes and carry them out ourselves. We must have the capacity to rebel against the established order. In this world, there is no established authority at all. This is a quality we have as human beings; otherwise we would be as extinct as the dinosaurs.
At the present time in which museums are attempting to open up, in order for us to be able to understand that what we have is extremely valuable and nothing must be lost, and in order not to lose our audience, it is the historian’s responsibility to search for the truth. A museum is not fulfilling its purpose if it doesn’t recognise that it must study its own collections and inform others, in writing and from a scientific, historical and artistic point of view, about what corresponds and does not correspond to an artist. The responsibility of a museum is to possess knowledge regarding what it has, regarding artists and regarding what exists and doesn’t exist. Anything else is undignified, a lie, hypocritical and this is not what a museum should be doing; its mission is to search for the truth. And the Prado has fulfilled this role pretty well. One of the first things I managed to remove from the walls of the Museum was a so-called Self-Portrait by Rembrandt, a work that now sits in the storerooms, because it’s a modern work and it was hanging in the museum as an original Self-Portrait by Rembrandt. And that is a disgrace for an institution such as the Prado. And there it was: “but it’s a Rembrandt, by whom we only have one work, and with this one we would have two.” No, like that we would simply have a stain on our intellectual honesty. The picture has to go. And I was able to get rid of other things over the years.