The Prado “illuminates” the relationship between Italy and Spanish Gothic in a large exhibition: “It takes a lot of time and money”

The National Prado Museum presented this Friday the exhibition ‘The way of Italy. Spain and Mediterranean Gothic’composed of 102 pieces of different techniques, aim to “illuminate” the Italian impact on Spanish Gothic before the Renaissance.

“To launch an exhibition like this takes a lot of time, a lot of will, a lot of money and entails extraordinary logistical challenges. One of the most visible is the restorations“said the director of the art gallery, Miguel Falomir.

In fact, he has assured that the “complexity” of this exhibition lies in the fact that it did not consist of “removing paintings from museums to hang them in the Prado”, but rather each piece comes from religious institutions that, in “some cases,” had not left in 700 years.

Thus, the pieces come from 31 Spanish institutions and 25 foreign ones, and as explained by Joan Molina, curator of the exhibition and head of the European Painting Collection until 1500, it has been a work of more than three years. Detailed Falomir that has had a cost of 1,287,225.33 euros.

For this exhibition, the institution has restored a total of 21 pieces, three of them are paintings owned by the gallery and the rest from external collections. Among them the altarpiece of Saint Mark and Saint Aniano, from the Seo de Manresa or the polyptych of the Virgen de la Leche from the Cathedral of Córdoba.

This is one of the samples for which the most restoration work has been done in the last 6 years, confirmed Falomir, who recalled other samples such as ‘Shake hands. Sculpture and color in the Golden Age’ y ‘Another Renaissance’

The curator of the exhibition explained that the art gallery’s restoration department – made up of specialists in sculpture, painting, wooden supports and frames – has carried out “intensive and complex” work to restore transparency to the colors and goldwhich were covered and turned off by old interventions.

“This project owes a lot to the restoration department. Few members have not participated in some of the restorations that have been done on all the pieces. Intensive, complex restorations that have required enormous attention, effort and precision. Only those of us who worked in this house know the quality standard of the restoration department, exceptional at an international level.“Molina pointed out.

In that sense, Falomir has recalled the Prado’s role as a restorer, since in the last 6 years a total of 167 works have been restored, 96 in the art gallery itself and 71 in external studios, and they have not always been their own works.

“Virtually all the autonomous communities have benefited in one way or another from this effort that the Prado Museum has made to benefit the country’s heritage. I would like this not to go unnoticed, just as I would also like the effort that the Prado Museum makes with each institution to show the works, to protect the works in the best possible way, not go unnoticed,” Falomir explained.

By typology, since the Covid-19 pandemic, the Prado has carried out recovery work on painting, which represents 75.85% of the total restored works; sculpture, which represents 13.17%; and decorative arts or others, 10.98%.

“IT IS AN ALMOST ANTI PRADO EXHIBITION”

The type of works that will be exhibited until September 20 range from painting to sculpture, including goldsmithing, illuminated manuscripts, drawings, embroidery and silk fabrics. For this reason, Molina has assured that it is an “almost anti-Prado” exhibition, as it is not what the construction of this art gallery is used to, “based on paintings that are “oil on canvas.”

“This is an exhibition, we could say, almost anti-Prado, because the construction of the museum is based on paintings that are oil on canvas, from the paintings of Titian, Velázquez, Rubens, Goya… And this is a totally different option, here we have paint and gold, then will come the empire of color – of pure color -. Here we have a different note,” he explained.

The president of the Royal Board of Trustees, Javier Solana, has pointed out that thanks to ‘The Italian Way’, the museum has “become” a “research center” on the subject. Thus, he explained that as a result of the exhibition “many things will come out” later. “The Prado continues working with the same spirit and the same desire to continue finding better things to share with the citizens of Spain and Madrid“, Solana has settled.