Voces del Prado

The Essence of Restoration and Former Criteria

Rafael Alonso Alonso, Restorer, 1978-2016

One of the fundamental things in restoration is to get to know and understand the work before you touch it, so that you don’t affect or alter the painter’s idea, ensuring that the work is preserved in the most integral manner possible. You musn’t clean it too much. I had seen, both at the Museum and in other collections, former restorations that had been quite selective; which is to say, they had cleaned sources of light, faces, white cloths and skies, and this completely altered the painter’s conception. For example, Ribera’s works had been made darker. They’d only cleaned the light sources, with the risk of damaging the glazed finishes. From the very beginning, I felt that pictures should be considered as a whole and it was important to clean all parts of them in an equal manner, endowing them with a sense of harmony and balance in terms of the light, volume and spaces that the painter had originally conceived.
Jerónimo Seisdedos is the twentieth century restorer that I most admire, because I have been able to restore many works on which he has worked, above all works by El Greco. And he restored them with criteria that were as modern and up to date as those we might apply today. It’s not a question of skill, but of intelligence and understanding.