In Prado exhibited a restored painting by Titian "San Juan Bautista"

The Prado Museum presented yesterday the restored painting “San Juan Bautista” (San Juan Bautista), owned by Titian Vecellio (1488-1576).

“San Juan Bautista” by Titian before and after restoration

Museum director Miguel Zugaza, head of the Italian painting department Miguel Falomir, restorer Clara Quintanilla and president of Fundación Iberdrola Manuel Marín presented a work that spent four years in the workshops of Prad. It is believed that the painting was painted in 1555. In 1872 she got into the museum, while the authorship of the painting was not established. Between 1886 and 2007, the canvas was in the parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the city of Cantoria, province of Almeria, in southern Spain.

Falomir noted that in 2007 the painting again hit the museum, in very poor condition. Before starting the restoration, the team of scientists for a long time studied replicas from the painting, which are in the collection of the Galleria dell´ Accademia in Venice and in the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Madrid.

All three paintings can be seen today at the exhibition, which will last until February 10. Art historians believe that the exhibition will help to understand how Titian himself made copies of his own paintings and stored them, what changes in colors, landscape details or people’s gestures he made at the same time. “Titian does not have two identical versions of the same picture. And this exposition will help us understand the look of the artist himself on his own canvases. The difference between the first and last copy of San Juan Bautista is almost 35 years, ”says Miguel Falomir.

The first version of the painting, stored today in Venice, was painted between 1530-1532, the last, belonging to the monastery, between 1565-1570. The painting was at one time highly praised by contemporaries, which made Titian one of the most sought-after artists of the Golden Age. Given this picture, the Prado Museum will have one of the world’s largest collections of works by Titian, consisting of 38 paintings by an Italian artist. The deputy director of the museum, Gabriele Finaldi, also noted that in the storerooms of the Prado Museum there are several more paintings that may turn out to belong to both Titian and other Renaissance artists. Restorers and historians of the museum have a lot of work to do to establish the authorship of these paintings and restore their original appearance.

Anna Sidorova