Madrid
Updated:
Keep
It is exhibited again, after its restoration, in the room 49 of the Villanueva del Prado building, dedicated to the Italian School of the 16th century, the larger panel painting (4.02 by 2.67 meters) and heavy (300 kilos for the board and 250 for the frame) from the Prado collection: ‘Transfiguration of the Lord’attributed to Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Pennicopy of the last work he painted Rafael before he died and which is in the Vatican Museums. This work, commissioned by Giulio de Médicis and which decorated the church of Santo Spirito degli Incurabili in Naples before his arrival in Madrid, offers a fairly exact record of the forms of the Raphaelesque original, omitting almost all the details, the landscape and the vegetation. .
has been subjected to a comprehensive restoration which has affected both the support and the pictorial layer and the frame, and which has had the collaboration of the Fundación Iberdrola España.
In the placement of the work, in which more than 8 hours have been invested, a dozen specialists have participated in the assembly of works of art of the Museum with the assistance of Conservation and Restoration technicians. During the technical study, the reflectografías taken with the infrared device (donated by American Friends of The Prado Museum) have served to support the cleaning and repainting work on the surface and have made it possible to perceive new and interesting details of the extraordinary quality of the underdrawing.
Almost 200 years after the last intervention, the work presented major damage both structurally and aesthetically, with opening of the joints of the support panels and the cracks present in it, and a strong oxidation and alteration of varnishes and color touch-ups made in the past. All the processes have been complex due to the large size of the painting and the difficulty of always having a global image of the work in mind, but there is no doubt that this collective effort has been worth it to recover the originality, integrity and beauty of a work of great value and importance in the collection.
The structural restoration of this work, financed by the Getty Foundation, has been directed by Jose de la Fuenterestorer of supports of the Museo Nacional del Prado, with the support of George Bisacca from the MET and two fellows, Gert van Gervent, from the Netherlands, and Alberto di Muccio, from Florence. The first performance on the stand was stitch fractures with ‘V’ grafts with poplar wood from old beams to proceed, later, to give consistency to the support without altering it and allowing the natural movements of the wood. To do this, the old crossbar system has been reused, adding a cushioning system made ‘on purpose’ inside it: from nylon screws, which hold the mechanism and give it pressure, to coil springs that give it flexibility.
The intervention in the pictorial layer, carried out by Eve Martinez, restorer of paintings at the Prado Museum, has consisted in the elimination of the numerous stuccoes applied to cracks and joints, which covered part of the original painting and prevented access to the support for intervention on it. Afterwards, the darkened and oxidized varnishes were removed and the numerous retouches made in the previous intervention were removed, which masked the original appearance of the work due to having confused, in the past, the transparent and unfinished appearance of the painting with losses. and wear and tear that really weren’t. This intervention has been essential to recover the beauty and uniqueness of the worksince the darkening of the surface, the aging of the colors and the excess of intervention prevented us from seeing the brightness of the colors, the precision of the modeling, the transparency of the shadows and the details that tell us about the technique, such as the areas in which shows the underlying drawing or the outline of the contours using the color stains themselves.
The work of plastering the cracks has been especially difficult in leveling the central union of the two pieces in which the work was cut in the past so that the union is not perceptible. Finally, the chromatic reintegration of the many paint layer loss produced throughout the complex history of this work, in which the various transfers from Rome to Naples and later to Madrid, as well as the successive manipulations and adverse conditions (including cutting the panel into two parts horizontally), had produced very significant gaps.
The frame of the ‘Transfiguration of the Lord’ is made of pine wood and gilded with fine gold made in the 19th century. Its profile, simple, is composed of a flat edge with a shiny finish (burnished gold) in which the union of the gold leaves is observed in a very accentuated way, mounting one on top of the other; a concave groove with a matte finish; a burnished edge, made up of a molding in the shape of a heel and a narrow, flat strip in the part closest to the painting. The restoration treatment, carried out by mayte way, restorer of Prado frames, with the purpose of recovering the appearance that it had originally, has consisted of cleaning the thick layer of dirt that prevented appreciating the different finishes of the frame; consolidate the different layers (plaster, bowl, gold sheets) that make up the traditional technique of gilding on wood; eliminate filling putties used in previous interventions to reconstruct losses due to the fact that they did not evolve well over time and their uneven application; reconstruct volumetric losses; and reintegrate the losses of the different strata by means of gilding to the water of the gilded surface and by means of chromatic reintegration with tempera to the ocher color glue of polychrome external parts of the four sides.
See them
comments