Voces del Prado

I Had Never Hung a Picture

Pilar Silva Maroto, Head of the Department of Conservation of Flemish Painting and the Northern Schools up to 1700, 1997-2017

I had never hung a picture and I never thought I would be able to set up a hall. When I entered a museum or an exhibition, I simply looked at the pictures. I wouldn’t even notice the frames, and I certainly wouldn’t focus on how they were exhibited or what the information cards were like. Why? Because I was looking inwards, and I was excited to see the works. But since I have worked at the Museum, as a matter of course I now look at how the works are hung, as well as the lighting; I notice the horror of the information cards, maybe the poor choice of colour or the way they are attached and fail to do justice to the works.
All of this is also important as part of the work at the Museum. You have to value what is most important, highlight it and compensate accordingly; you can’t hang something really small alongside something really big; you have to balance the space between the works. It’s always best to free the corners, because if you hang things near corners it’s as if they lack space and the works are lost. It’s a question of sensibility and balance.
I enjoyed this work so much that I didn’t just hang my own collection, but I took charge of the hanging of others in the time of Fernando Checa. For example, I helped Miguel Ángel Elvira set up the Classical sculpture halls, which they’d spent more than three years trying to do and hadn’t managed to complete because of disagreements amongst those who were responsible for arranging the works.
When we were refurbishing the roof (Trinidad de Antonio had already left) we had to close Hall 12 and a part of the Main Gallery. In one and a half days we had to set up Velázquez, Murillo, Ribera and all of the 17th century Spanish paintings, but the picture entitled The Family of Philip V, due to its dimensions, couldn’t be kept in the storerooms, and so it was decided that a panel would be created to cover it up and, in front, as if it were a screen, another work would be placed that formed part of the whole. But later on, when they had to take the whole roof off, we couldn’t leave The Family of Philip V where it was, and we had to remove it from the wall and place it on another wall, once again in just a day and a half, with all the assembly problems this entails for the halls. In the end, when we were finishing Hall 18, which I think is the big one, the Murillo Hall, I said the Art Handlers, “Look, I’ve got a doubt here”, and they said, “There’s no room for doubt”, because we’d spent one and a half days without a break, from eight in the morning until eleven at night, setting the hall up.