Restoration: Mary Tudor, Queen of England, Second Wife of Philip II

The restoration of Maria Tudor meant a recovery of a work that was seen in a dirty, altered room like so many others that we have addressed in restoration, but in this case this oxidised varnish gave the work an extreme rigidity. It is true that it is a severe portrait, a real portrait, of great imposture, but it was excessively rigid due to these old, so oxidised restorations. The first analyses showed the presence of three different resins in the varnish, of almacea, dammar and colophonia. This implies that there had not been a complete restoration with a single varnish, but that there were remnants of various interventions, of various moments that we needed to restore, to put in a state of balance. An important detail was that in the first ultraviolet analyses the varnish was oxidised all the same, except in three areas where a clean-up had clearly been carried out. In the area of the Queen's left hand, in the shoulder and in the background, where the restorers were trying to find the column. This meant that from the outset the face was still yellowish, the left hand a little more transparent, whitish. It was already decomposed and this gave us an idea of how to find the balance in this work. We could say that the state of conservation was fine. It was a stable work, there didn't seem to be any major losses and the pictorial elevation that it had was very contained. This meant that I was able to approach the clean-up from the outset in two phases. The first was to prepare the restoration of the support. The restoration of the panels was not always necessary. It was necessary in this case because, above all, the left panel had an inverted formwork in the opposite direction to the other two, which created a great tension in the painting and the entire left area along with the Queen's face had lost the support support. The painting was very elevated. The pictorial elevation was creating a deformation of the support. It was time to remove this link. In my first clean-up I removed the first varnishes in a simple way, as is always the case in the Museo del Prado, because they were natural varnishes, easily soluble, and I released, in addition to removing the repaints, I released especially the two panels. These two panels had not been completely opened in antiquity, only a part of them, but they did have a series of restorations and repaints that needed to be removed in order to properly level the support. After the restoration of the support, with the work consolidated, when I approached the complete clean-up I began to understand the true nature of this work and why it was such a rigid, so brown in the room, so opaque. It really has an irresolvable problem of conservation. It is a chemical alteration of the skirt. That brown cloak that covers the Queen is really painted in purple tones, that is, it is made up of red lacquer and enamel blue. This enamel blue has been chemically altered, it has become brown and when I began to release the repaints that covered the cloak I clearly revealed what they covered. They covered a series of greenish traces on the cloak that were nothing more than the altered enamel blue. This gave an unbalanced, unequal image and put me on the path to the main problem of this restoration, which was to restore the balance. When we have a work like this, not of such a large format, with very sharp and clear elements, in which the face, the hands or the white blouse, which emerges from the skirt, are perfectly preserved because they are very loaded with lead white, I know that in them I will be able to reach 100% the closest to what Moro painted. Whereas in the skirt, due to the chemical alteration, I am very far away, I would never be able to reach it. So I had to realise and think from the beginning of a very contained cleaning, remaining very short, containing a lot of the cleaning in these white elements, in the face and in the hands, so that it would not be unbalanced. To speak a little exaggeratedly, if this painting had been cleaned carelessly without having this balance present, it could have remained as an immense brown from which the face and the hands emerged as ghosts. After the first cleaning, you can see the very raised craquelure, something that was almost not appreciated before because it was clogged by the oxidised varnishes. It is at this moment that I can access a seat of colour. Indeed, the most elevated area of the table on our left, on the right of the Queen, the background in which the wood of this support panel had had more movement and the craquelure was more elevated, as well as in the face. I did the seat of colour with animal tail, with rabbit tail, in the traditional style. Then the second cleaning would come, the adjustment of the last things, especially below the chair and the second cleaning of the face. After finishing the cleaning, it will be essential to choose a varnish that would saturate the original paint and restore the lost agglutinant to the oil. For this I used damar varnish but extremely diluted, with two ideas. The first idea was to restore the saturation that was impregnated within these microparticles of paint that had lost their agglutinant. Secondly, to avoid, as much as possible, the highlights. It is a work that, because it is on the table, because its general tone is very dark, produces a certain mirrored effect. The intention, then, is to make a minimum varnish so that the reflection of our image, of the visitor's image, is reduced as much as possible. The space in this painting, for example, I also had to look for it because the background on the right of the Queen, we always had in mind that there was a column that could hardly be seen in the galleries. We have a lot of 19th-century engravings whose engravers have shown this column very clearly. I really thought it would be much more evident, that it was only covered by the oxidised varnishes and this made it more opaque. Now it can be seen perfectly, not only the column but all the architecture, the vertical panel that finishes the building, the final moulding of this kind of balcony, even the deep black of the upper left corner of the painting, which is an opening to space. It is true that it is all about very subtle elements, a brown on brown that Moro really painted and painted with delicacy trying to find this small opening. It is a further advance in the portraiture of the moment, which until then only depicted the kings a little more erratically and he tries to open a space towards the background. The second element of the space is the chair in which Maria Tudor sits. This chair marks the only horizontal element of the painting. The worst damage is concentrated in it, really between the legs, in the dark area there were lost parts. With the cleaning, this small clarity at the end of the fringes, this space achieves the horizontal on which the Queen sits again and concentrates the space of the painting. The recovery of the signature has also been very interesting. This work is inscribed in the lower left area below the Queen's skirt and it is a very subtle inscription that is barely visible, but it has been given a little more power by this fold of the Queen's skirt. It is inscribed as Antonio Mor Pinchebat, 1554. I think that what I have recovered with this restoration is the character of Maria Tudor. She has always been seen as a very harsh and severe queen. She was really a victim, a bit of her history, of her life, separated from her mother and repudiated by her father, but this severe character was added by the dirtiness of the painting. The tremendous yellow that covered her face removed all the human qualities. Now, with the cleaning, the transparency of the cutis has been recovered, even a little wrinkle on her cheek. You can even see a certain smile on her mouth and a glow in her eyes, which I think makes her a closer queen, a kinder queen. These are small details that have made me understand how such a brilliant painter as Moro is able to capture this person's psychology. For me, it's like the beginning of this portrait of Corte, which was later followed by Sanchez Cuello, Pantoja and Velázquez. It's the beginning of this attempt to portray a monarch, not only for his representation, his rose and his glove, but also for the psychology captured in the glow of his eyes, the transparency of his forehead and the small smile on his mouth.