Voces del Prado

Implementing a new concept of restoration

Matías Díaz Padrón, Technical Advisor and Head of the Department of Conservation of Flemish Painting and the Northern Schools up to 1700, 1970-2005

A curator has a dual task looming ahead, the responsibility of conserving works of art. They oversee the restoration of works of art and at the same time they must identify works and know their authors. At the restoration workshops there were a number of elderly gentlemen, memorable characters, men who warranted respect, but in a way they were old-fashioned in that they considered that the most important thing when it came to restoring works was reintegration. In other words, they typically competed with the original painter. I had a difficult time applying my new approach, whereby conserving a work of art consisted of touching it as little as possible or nothing at all if required. I found many a problem in that department.
I don't remember the name but one of the most prominent heads of a department finished restoring the Antonello de Messina we have here, a commission by Xavier de Salas, later to become the director, he was a director of mine here together with Don Diego. He was entrusted with the restoration and he proudly wanted us to see his work and I went there with Xavier de Salas. So he commented, "Let's see if you can tell where the angels' tears are and which ones are mine." In other words, in order to balance out the composition he had added two or three tears. His idea of restoration meant embellishing the work. To me that was heresy, I tried to prevent it. Don Xavier took me aside and said, "Quiet, when he leaves or retires we'll fix this." That mentality was common, that of the restorer who had to embellish a work of art. That was a period of disappointments, from then on, as you can imagine, I had to struggle against that. I also had to fight for them to get the hemming right, sometimes it was harmful, to the point that they broke the wooden frames. Those were difficult times, I was at a crossroads both in technical terms and in terms of the history of art.