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Museo Nacional del Prado
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0:09:13
Views: 476
Channels: European ArtPaintingSpanish Language
Themes: Learning to Look
Video with comments by Lucía Martínez, museum's painting restorer, explaining the work French Cuirassier by José de Madrazo as part of the educational programme 'The Prado speaks', an activity that takes place every Friday at noon, in which the museum's professionals comment on works of the collection.
Coracero francésby José de Madrazo. Comments by Lucía Martínez. Restorer Museo Nacional del Prado
Good morning, my name is Lucía and I am the restorer who worked on this painting, which is one of the most recent additions to the Museum?s collection.
It was acquired at auction in April 2009 and I restored it for presentation in the new 19th-century galleries.
It would seem to have been painted in 1813-1814, and it is worth looking at what was happening and that time and what José de Madrazo was painting. He had been given a royal grant by Charles IV to go to Rome
where he executed numerous commissions. José de Madrazo was an extremely acute individual with an enormous ability to build up a network of clients and contacts, as he did throughout his life.
This explains the present portrait of a cuirassier lieutenant (his attributes such as the Legion of Honour indicate that he is a high-ranking officer,
while the sword, iron helmet and cuirass identify him as a member of the cuirassier regiment). Madrazo offers a bourgeois re-reading of the heroic, military portrait.
We might suggest that the present work is closer to the tradition of his painting Sacred and Divine Love, which Madrazo had executed the previous year and which is echoed here in the identical position of the figure?s legs.
In other words, this canvas is considerably indebted to the visual language that Madrazo evolved, worked on and developed for Sacred and Divine Love but which is now filtered through the more Neo-classical approach of David or Ingres.
In the present case we are dealing with a monumental portrait in which the figure is almost larger than the horse. The horse is a domesticated one and its forms are rather out of proportion but Madrazo does not seem to have been interested in it.
The figure?s face and gesture is extremely severe and linear, with a rather harsh effect, and we should bear in mind that Madrazo was in Rome where he had available to him
numerous busts of Roman emperors, in fact the entire classical world, which is clearly referred to in this work, in my opinion.
In 1814 at the same time that Madrazo was in Rome, producing commissioned portraits of prominent personalities in the city, Goya was paintingThe 2nd of May and The 3rd of May.
Given that The 2nd of May also includes horses it is interesting to compare the two approaches to the animal:
Goya almost humanises them, using them to express the suffering, fear and anguish that the humans beings in the painting are experiencing.
This is not the case in the present work. Here the horse seems completely distracted and self-absorbed, while the relaxed pose of the cuirassier also points to this new bourgeois reading of the heroic portrait.
As is habitual practice, before embarking on restoration a technical study of the work was undertaken in order to obtain the maximum amount of information in order to decide on what could be done.
The x-ray confirmed my hypothesis that all the lower part of the painting was more thickly painted and with more impasto than the rest of the painting,
while the pigment was also applied in a slightly different way. The completely black parts of the x-ray are areas of damage in which the paint has been completely lost.
I think the canvas must have been propped up on the ground, which became wet, and the water was absorbed by capillary action into the canvas and rose up through it, resulting in the loss of all the paint in the part that had become wet.
I think the canvas must have been propped up on the ground, which became wet, and the water was absorbed by capillary action into the canvas and rose up through it, resulting in the loss of all the paint in the part that had become wet.
The person who restored it was a competent all-round painter who knew perfectly well what he was doing and did not use the same pigments or colours as José de Madrazo.
The repainted part does not include white lead, which is, however, used in the white parts of the painting and in the priming (as can be seen here)
Here, however, there is no white lead, but rather zinc white and titanium white, which are modern pigments used in the present day as replacements for white lead.
Given that they are modern pigments, they could not have been applied by Madrazo. I asked for a life-size enlargement of the x-ray and calculated the areas of damage on a piece of transparent film
that I superimposed over the painting in order to see which areas adjoined the damage and whether there was any possibility of retrieving what lay underneath the repainted areas.
This is not a decision that is taken individually but rather in close collaboration with the Museum?s 19th-century paintings curators, José Luis Díez and Javier Barón,
who help the restorers to understand the painting by providing us with information on its history. It could be seen that there was nothing beneath the area of flowers
and it therefore did not make sense to remove something if an original area was not going to be recovered.
Another element that troubled the restorers were these horizontal marks, which are cracks produced as the picture has aged. The preparatory layers are notably oily,
containing a quantity of linseed oil to make them dry faster, as well as calcium carbonate and lead white, which enable us to see the marks of the brush in the x-ray.
They are therefore extremely hard preparations given that the oil hardens over time. In turn, the paint itself was mixed with a large amount of oil,
and we might say that this is a very ?juicy? painting (which is not a technical term but is nonetheless a useful one). Madrazo added copious oil to his mix, and in fact, when looking at the painting laid down flat
from the side it can be seen that in spite of being a highly worked canvas that was by no means painted instantly,
it does not use a heavily charged brushstroke (as we find in the case of Sorolla or other painters) but is in fact so rich in oil that it has little body.
As the paint dries this makes the painting even more rigid, and what we find here is a rigid preparation
over which there is an oily paint surface that is also rigid, while underneath the canvas moves in response to the moisture in its environment
The result is that it cracks and breaks because the movement of the canvas does not go in the same direction as that of the paint. The restorer has to be alert to the fact
that cracked paintings are liable to paint loss and if this is the case they have to be restored. In the present case some areas had to be consolidated, returning these cracks to the surface alone.
This particular painting presented a problem that restorers never like to deal with and which causes us considerable anxiety.
The problem was that the painting had been cleaned in the past but to very variable degrees. The head, for example, had been excessively cleaned.
We see a slim, probably red-headed young man with very prominent cheekbones and an abstracted gaze as he looks into the distance.
As a commissioned portrait the sitter would have wished to have been presented
in a favourable light and Madrazo would not have hesitated to offer a pleasing depiction.
In addition, the trousers and part of the gloves were excessively covered with thick,
yellow varnishes to the extent that the figure had visually blended into the background. Cleaning the painting has thus been a relatively complex undertaking
as it inevitably involves an element of interpretation with a need to understand the painting and obviously an intention to return it as far as possible to its original appearance and with the original tonal values.
When removing yellowed varnish there is inevitably some loss to the topmost tonal gradations and these have to be replaced to some extent, softening the overall effect
This involved the relatively complex task
of applying a covering glaze in those areas where original glazes had been lost through excessive cleaning.
Coracero francésby José de Madrazo. Comments by Lucía Martínez. Restorer Museo Nacional del Prado
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