Voces del Prado

Adam and Eve by Dürer. A wonderful experience

George Bisacca, Restorer, 1985-What's on

The Adam and Eve treatment was a wonderful experience. That was also done under the auspice of the Getty Panel Painting Initiative. They paid for the work and we had constantly observers, or some assistants, arriving from other countries to watch José de la Fuente and I work.
The thing that was so great about working on that, especially as a teaching tool, was that the two pictures had quite a different history from a certain point. The Eve panel still retains its original surface on the back. In fact, it’s painted on the back and has a kind of speckled panel as if it’s imitating porphyry or some kind of stone. Instead, the Adam reverse was completely planed down —the panel was thinned to about less than half of its original thickness—, and a very heavy cradling system was applied to the back, which then blocked and cause about 60 splits in the panel. So, it had a completely different history than the Eve.
Of course, we started first on the Eve because it was a simpler treatment, and we could learn more about it as we went along. After we did all this very complicated work on the Adam, by removing the cradle on the back, rejoining each of the splits, changing the curvature … We put in 381 pieces of wood panel V-shaped pieces that went down to almost touch the paint film from the reverse. Incredible dangerous and difficult to execute. And when we finished the whole thing, we had to make a secondary kind of bastidor, a strainer, to support it, with a spring mechanism and a very complicated thing. But we were amazed to see that after we completed it, the curve that it just naturally assumed by us putting together all this pieces, came out to be exactly the same as the Eve. So, when they got framed together, it looked like nothing has ever happened to them. That was really quite satisfying to work on.