Voces del Prado

A valuable initiative. The Getty Panels Painting

George Bisacca, Restorer, 1985-What's on

In conversation with Tom Wilmering at the Getty, we realized the difficulty that this last generation of real experts in the field were going to be approaching retirement and there was really no one to replace them. We tried to get experts from around the world: London, Florence, Brussels, and Madrid; and we tried to bring them all together and decided to make a network where, based on various projects, we could make trainees fly in to come in and observe two experts working, for example José de la Fuente and I.
They would come in and stay for a month (the Getty paid for their hotels, their meals, their travel, their … everything) to watch us work, and help in small ways, etc. And then, maybe after doing something with us, they would go another time to a project in England and work with restorers there. This way they could get a varied experience of how different treatments were done around the world. I think 14 million dollars was given to the initiative over the course of ten years or so, to finance these various projects. I think it did quite a lot to advance the field. So, that was really a great thing that the Getty was able to do.