Voces del Prado

Probable Position of the Globe Before the Flood

Mercedes Orihuela Maeso, Conservator of the Service of Deposits, 1975-What's on

Most of the time you don’t know what you’re looking for. That is to say, there are pictures that were deposited during periods in which photography didn’t exist and we have no references. I like to tell the story of the Polytechnic Institute of Pontevedra, which had a deposited work which bore a reference number, but we didn’t know what it looked like. Its title was Posición probable del Globo antes del diluvio (Probable Position of the Globe Before the Flood). But we had one advantage: the paintings at the Museo del Prado that came from the Modern Art Museum have a painted number on them, either in the lower right-hand corner or the left-hand corner, which is the number of the inventory it comes from. And in cases in which the number is missing, we have to try to identify the work from the reference we have. But in the case of the Probable Position of the Globe Before the Flood we didn’t know what the identifying feature might be. As it turned out, this work by Francisco Díaz Carreño depicts a blonde girl with medium-length hair standing on a stool and sticking her hand into a fish-bowl that her mother has placed on a shelf. Naturally, since she can’t quite reach, she’s stretching, and the bowl is about to fall on her, fish and all. And that’s why the painting is entitled Probable Position of the Globe, which is the fish-bowl, Before the Flood, which refers to the water that is about to fall on the girl. Now isn’t that just something! In the nineteenth century, painters were quite witty and sometimes gave their pictures quite unusual titles.