Voces del Prado

I Have a Very Good Eye

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

I have a very good eye, and that is essential when it comes to knowing who a work is by. It’s not that I’m blowing my own trumpet, but I just have it. For example, I have no ear at all, but I have a very good eye. An anecdote that don Diego Angulo used to tell, not to me directly, but to many different people, was as follows: “Where I see one hand, Pili Silva sees two”. I have it because I’ve been looking at these artists since the 1970’s. I know the Primitives as if they were members of my own family, because I didn’t just restrict myself to studying the Spanish artists. I studied the Flemish masters, the Germans, the Italians, the French, everything from the period. I studied all the works of the period. You have to have a sense of perspective, you have to know about the painter, about the age, about the history of art and about 50,000 other things. You also have to know that the same painter didn’t always paint the same way and, for example, when he sketched, you have to know what he used the sketch for: whether it was an outline or a sketch, or whether he was going to throw it away. I can’t tell you, “This is a Velázquez”, but I can tell you, “This is not a Velázquez”.