Voces del Prado

The key. To look at more and more paintings

George Bisacca, Restorer, 1985-What's on

I think that, in order to develop from a good restorer to a great restorer, the most important thing is: look at more paintings. There’s nothing that can prepare you as much as looking critically at every aspect of paintings: every physical aspect, every metaphorical aspect, every philosophical aspect. You have to understand what that object is in every sense. The more you understand about paintings and what they really are, the better qualified you are to tailor your intervention, to be appropriate for that case. You want to do, of course, as little as possible, to change the artwork. Much of the work that we do is removing bad treatments from the past and letting the original speak. I think that, because there are no hard fast rules about exactly the types of interventions that you can make, the more that you understand the thing as a three-dimensional object in every sense, the better it qualifies you to make the right choices.