Voces del Prado

The right person

Juan Luna Fernández, Head of the Department of Conservation of 18th Century Painting, 1969-2016

I completed my doctoral thesis and my academic assessors were four senior professors of art history (Diego Angulo, Xavier de Salas, José Manuel Pita Andrade and Alfonso Pérez Sánchez), all of whom were my professors at different periods of my life, in addition to a senior professor of history (Cepeda Adán). I can’t complain about my assessment as I got the highest rating. So I thought I could take a bit of a break as I also held the post of senior professor of Geography and History at the Instituto de Enseñanza Media in Madrid. So, you can imagine how surprised I was when a sort of small conclave of my former teachers and assessors decided that I had to present myself for public examination again! I said that I’d already done that and that I could continue working with the Museo del Prado as I’d already been doing, undertaking research, giving lectures, but that I really didn’t want to do any more of these official exams as they were really tough and the ones for senior professor already had been. But they said, “No, because we have to set up a department here, the Prado has to have departments and you’re the right person to head one of them.” So I had to do more official exams, which I thought would be exams in French painting, but they told me: “No, we’ve decided that as you already know about other schools, the department is going to be called ‘French, English and German painting’.” So the exams were based on that, and as you might expect were extremely tough.