Voces del Prado

A Different Criterion for Restoration

Rocío Dávila Álvarez, Restorer, 1974-2015

It was another way of carrying out restoration. I had come from the Restoration School, which had a more modern and more involved approach to art restoration. But here they carried out a more preventive kind of restoration; they just removed the dust and left it at that. In one way it’s great, because thanks to the fact that the Prado’s works haven’t been touched that much, they’re pretty well preserved. The cleaning processes haven’t involved abrasive procedures or anything. I think that, given they were so conservative in terms of restoration, they really did very little, and this means the works at the Prado are so well preserved. In the case of Martín Gamo, who was responsible for the sculpture, it was quite the contrary. He wanted to train himself and carry out a much more detailed kind of restoration. During the time I worked with him as a colleague, he made two trips to Italy, subsidised by the Museum, so that he could learn hard-stone techniques. At the Prado, we have a very important collection of hard-stone tables. He was a sculptor and he was very good, but he wanted to acquire further training in the field of restoration.