Voces del Prado

1981-1996. My responsibilities as Assistant Director

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

I could see that my work at the Museum was important, like that of the Director, whose door was always open, as was mine. Open so that anyone could come in without having to make an appointment. My job was to make decisions, and I think I knew how to decide things because people came in to see me en masse to ask about what they had to do. My job was to listen, and to see what had turned out badly; then they went and did what I told them to do. For all those who are working it’s important to know that there is somebody above them who is prepared to take all the responsibility. All of it! Which means if they make a mistake, it’s not their responsibility! It’s mine! I think this is the most important thing for a boss. I’m not referring to the post of Assistant Director at the Museo del Prado necessarily, but the head of anything, such as a football manager. It’s no good saying: “Look how badly these boys have played today.” This is the ultimate job of the person who heads up something: giving confidence to others, making them feel secure at the place where they work.
In order to manage an institution such as this, you have to have a really cool head. You have to have a strategic capacity and a very cool head, not simply deciding things in the heat of the moment, but making good decisions based on a cool analysis. You have to see the whole picture, and that is very important too: being able to reach decisions without fits of rage, bad humour or violence. You have to make decisions properly, with a strong mind.
One of the first things I remember in my role as Assistant Director of the Museo del Prado was when I heard a knock on the door of my office and a member of the Art Handler team came in who used to help move the works and sometimes moved other items as well. This man came in the afternoons and I wasn’t sure what he actually did. He was responsible for hunting the mice throughout the Museum. He came into the office with a very high cage containing around twenty mice that he had just caught, all squeaking and biting one another. And he said: “Doña Manuela, what should I do with these?.” The Director and Assistant Director had changed and he didn’t know what orders to follow in order to get rid of the mice. I said to him: “What do you normally do?” And he replies: “I throw them in a drum full of water.” So I said, “well, do that today, and tomorrow we’ll change the procedure.” And then we looked for rodent control teams to come and exterminate the mice at the Museum in a rather less Medieval manner. Because that was quite simply Medieval. But it was interesting, because you must never lose touch with reality. I found the Prado very interesting, because there were people like this man who hunted mice and then entered the warehouses in order to keep things in order, making sure that nothing serious would happen that might affect the Museum. In an institution such as this, every one of us has always had the same importance, each within his area of activity. At that time, the difference in wages between this man who hunted mice and the Director was very small; the Director didn’t even make three times his wages. In my opinion, that kind of equality was good.