Voces del Prado

Modelli of The Triumph of the Eucharist, by Rubens. One of the most complex works

George Bisacca, Restorer, 1985-What's on

The bocetos (modelli) for The Triumph of the Eucharist, for many years that I was coming here, there was always talk about working on those pictures, because they had so many problems, so many cracks and so. As you know, they all had these additions around the perimeter that were not original to Rubens. They were added, I think, in the 18th century. The idea was always: Do we leave those additions, because they have a certain historical importance, or do we remove them and only deal with the Rubens pictures? No one really took the decision to go ahead with the treatment until these recent ones.
José and I agreed that no matter what the solution was, we had to remove the additions, because they were causing so much of the damage. We ended up doing it in a way that allows an option. We took the frames that it had, the kind of Meng’s-designed frames, and the additions, and we joined the additions together so that the frame and the additions are now in storage and just the Rubens panels themselves have new frames on them. But if, at some later time, they want to have some kind of didactic exhibition about the history of those pictures, they can always take the paintings and set them back into the frame’s additions, so that it can be exhibited temporarily even in that situation, or take them out. So, we will left both options available. But those were very difficult pictures to work on. I think José will say also that that was some of the most difficult ones that we had done, because the original wood was thinned down to about, in some cases, 3 or 4 millimeters thick. They were incredible fragile and had certain curvatures, so designing structures that could support them and still allow them to expand and contract with humidity changes and so on … this was a particularly difficult group to work on.