Voces del Prado

The first X-ray. The Descent from the Cross, by Rogier van der Weyden

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

The first x-ray we did was of The Descent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden. We have gone back to this painting on several occasions, for restorations and other reasons, but that first X-ray was incredible because we didn't even have automatic developers for the X-ray plates. We had to set up some trays designed by Professor Cabrera, and we used a bathroom in the Villanueva building to develop and set them. Today this would seem to be a rather speedy process but then things were different. Besides, we had to do all the plates for a single work on the same day, because some of the plates would come out differently. We had to do the prints in a very small room, moving around such a big picture without any help. Now the team is always at hand and everything is better organized. We had to shift the painting around to do one half, then the other half. Of course we put the utmost care into our work. I must say that, with all the paintings I've had to work on, there were never any accidents. We might call it controlled risk. And then when we saw the results--that was surely a thrill. So many years looking at the painting on the Museum walls and now we had its X-ray. I had come from the Restoration Institute and had seen the X-rays of many paintings because that's what my doctoral dissertation was about. But The Descent from the Cross was a major work. It wasn't just any other painting. There are works that for reasons that you cannot explain, or maybe it's just the day or the moment, that stir up different feelings, you see them in a different light.