Voces del Prado

Technical documentation. The bridge between Conservation and Restoration

Carmen Garrido Pérez, Head of the Technical Office, 1982-2012

Basically since we set up the Technical Office at the Prado Museum, the purpose in terms of technical documentation was to make a technical file of every painting, so that technical data could be consulted in the same way as historical data.
There are actually two very specific applications.
I have always viewed that documentation as a bridge between the history of art and restoration. There are two fields laid before us: one is checking the state of conservation of a given work to guide the restoration process, which is carried out at the atelier of the Prado Museum, and the other part has to do with what the data can provide to the history of art and the study of pictorial techniques. Those are the fields in which technical documentation is basically present. They are supplementary fields that use the same methods.