“What we were seeing until now was not really Caravaggio’s work, it was a partial image,” says Almudena Sánchez, restorer of the Prado Museum. David, the conqueror of Goliath, the only Caravaggio in the Madrid museum, now shines again in the museum’s rooms after a restoration that has restored the real tones of its chiaroscuro after long periods in which only its light areas were cleaned, to accentuate them, which ended up making the painting flat and made it lose the three-dimensionality of the scene.
Likewise, the Prado has taken advantage of the return of the painting to reorganize its room and break the traditional narratives, centered on national schools, and show the influence throughout Europe of a painter who in this specific painting, as the x-rays show, hid the first face that he painted of Goliath, a face of horror, with the giant still alive but in his death throes, with his eyes incredulous and wild for having been defeated by the shepherd boy David.
“Almost all of Caravaggio’s works are masterpieces. It has been very enriching to restore it. It has a special strength and power. We learn a lot with these works. About the artist’s technique, about the historical process, how she poses the lights, the shadows , how they create the transitions of the shadows, what the creative process is, how they work with glazes and halftones. We discover all of this as we clean it up, because in this work, in principle, that could not be valued: it was under the layers of dirt and varnish that had been causing transparency to be lost and acted as a veil that prevented depth and space from being seen, everything was reduced to a single plane and you saw David as a figure retold against the dark background. You were getting lost. a lot of information, seeing a distorted image. The opacity of the varnishes was reducing the space of the composition to a single plane and you looked at it and you didn’t quite understand it. It was essential to remove that yellow veil to reveal Caravaggio’s true work,” says Sánchez .
Remember that before starting a restoration, “we always have the necessary technical studies, we are a huge team, this works like a hospital.” “And in those technical studies, in addition to seeing the state of conservation, we were able to see impressive and shocking changes in composition. The x-ray shows us that the first idea that Caravaggio had was to paint a Goliath still alive, in that last moment of life, with his eyes bulging and his mouth open, uttering a terrifying scream. The change in his face is spectacular. Caravaggio probably changed his mind because he wanted to focus more on the reflective moment, David tying up Goliath’s hair and considering what had happened, what he had done. Nor can we be sure if it was the reason or if it was the client who did not want to face that look,” reasons the restaurateur.
He says that the famous technique of the Italian painter, chiaroscuro, in this painting “is not what it seemed at first, with one element full of light and the rest almost black, but there are some very interesting transitions. With the cleaning, a halo of light around David’s head that shows us the space between that head and the background, the dimension of the place in which it is located, a space that did not exist before. The cleanings that this work had undergone in the past were selective, they had focused on the points of light. It was something very typical of old interventions. They were going to enhance the illuminated areas, seeking effectiveness and prominence in them. The dark areas were ignored. With that what happened is that the chiaroscuro It reached an extreme of very violent contrast. Now we are seeing the air around it. With those old cleanings they altered the work and in the end they showed you what the person who had intervened in the work wanted to highlight,” he adds.
And he says that “another very important thing about this work is a very evident three-dimensional effect in the figure of David. Because we can see how he projects his shoulder and knee towards us, towards the viewer. And this three-dimensional effect is enhanced by the curious David’s posture, creating a rectangle with his body. The moment you stand in front of the painting to contemplate it, you feel something special, you don’t really know what it is, and it is that in reality David’s figure is crossing the foreground of the composition, projecting itself towards the viewer. Something very impressive and that not every artist is capable of achieving.”
A new light that is completed with the rearrangement of the Prado collection around the Caravaggio. David Garcia Cueto, head of the Department of Italian and French Painting until 1800, remembers that the museum, from its origins, “like all museums created in the 19th century, was structured by schools: in some rooms Spaniards were shown, in others Flemish, in other French. And that is a very academic method, but it is often impoverishing. In order to tell stories of the past, it greatly reduces the intensity of those stories. In the case of Caravaggesque painting, until now they had been exhibited for a on the other hand the Spanish, on the other the French, on the other the Flemish and the Dutch. And now, on the occasion of the restoration, the room where the Caravaggio is located and the adjoining one have been remodeled, abolishing the traditional cliché and speaking of a transnational phenomenon such as “It was that of naturalistic or Caravaggio painting. Now you can see in this space authors from all these nations who have the nexus of admiration for Caravaggio.”
A transnational dialogue of authors, he explains, who had “a fascination with that way of painting. Ribera, Ribalta, Georges de La Tour, from the French school. Painters characterized by putting the focus of vision on reality, far from idealized academic models , which were often more mental constructions than traces of reality. Naturalism focuses on models that are often ordinary people, represented in an exciting but quite direct way to embody characters from biblical history, saints, but also everyday scenes, such as players of cards or a fortune teller. And this approach to reality is accompanied by a very intense and contrasting play of lighting, with backgrounds that are usually in darkness or semi-darkness and foregrounds illuminated by powerful spotlights. This combination between the models of reality and contrasted lighting would be the two fundamental keys to this movement.”
And although he recognizes that other pictorial phenomena “of great influence perhaps remained more limited to specific areas of Europe, such as Rubens, he also indirectly influenced the Madrid school, with which, progressively, the Prado will review the way in which that tells its collections, overcoming this cliché of the national school and approaching the narration of a movement that often involves people of very diverse nationalities. “Caravaggio would be one more contribution in that sense, but others can be made,” he concludes.
