Voces del Prado

Traces of the creative process

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

In an X-ray, the first thing you can expect is to see a painting beneath the final result, stories like that are always so entertaining for everybody, they are interesting and show that there was a preliminary project, a second one or other changes made by the painter.
But we move well beyond the X-ray. We study the canvas or other formats such as wood.
You have to look at Flemish paintings in a special way. The naked eye shows you some things but internally you find others. The X-ray tells you a lot about the brush strokes. When you look at a painting you see the end result, everything the artist produced at the end of the creative process. But there is a structure in the design, the layers and everything that is superimposed. Of course, the end result is what matters, but when you look into how the artist worked you want to find the successive layers of things. The X-ray shows how the artist applies the first layer of paint, and how the different stages are incorporated to the painting. In works that are copies, which were not poorly considered in their day, they only copy the final structure but not the internal process, and that internal process only shows up based on the painter's approach, the materials he used. The materials, the paint, which since the late 15th century and in the 16th, 7th and 18th centuries are based on white mixed with lead, that's what really shows up, it must be said that they had to apply it generously because for instance the final stages of a painting are done with very fine layers, they do not really show up on the end result of the X-ray. Infrared light basically reveals the underlying drawing, especially in the 15th and 16th century paintings of the major schools of painting, French, Spanish, Flemish and Italian. And the drawings are different, the same as the drawings on paper are different.