The Prado Museum After its restoration, it returns to exhibit, in room 49 of the Villanueva building, dedicated to the Italian School of the 16th century, the largest and heaviest panel painting in the Prado collection: ‘Transfiguration of the Lordr’, attributed to Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni a copy of the last work that Rafael painted before he died.
This work, commissioned by Giulio de Médicis and which decorated the Santo Spirito degli Incurabili church in Naples before his arrival in Madrid, offers a fairly exact record of the forms of the Raphaelesque original, omitting almost all the details landscape and vegetation.
During the technical study, the reflectographies taken with the infrared device 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 underlying drawing.
Almost 200 years after the last intervention, the work presented “significant damage” both structurally and aesthetically, with opening of the joints of the support panels and the cracks present in it, and strong oxidation and alteration of the varnishes and color retouches 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”, they have pointed out from the art gallery.
The work has undergone a comprehensive restoration that has affected both the support and the pictorial layer and the frame. It is the largest panel painting in the collection (4.02 x 2.67 meters) and the heaviest, 550 kilos (300 kilos for the panel and 250 kilos for the frame).
In the placement of ‘Transfiguration’ in which more than eight hours have been invested, a dozen specialists have participated in assembling works of art from the Museum with the assistance of Conservation and Restoration technicians.
The structural restoration of this work has been financed by the Getty Foundation and directed by José de la Fuente, support restorer at 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.