The wise man of Flemish painting
Former curator of the Museo del Prado, he drew up the first catalog raisonné of Flemish painting in the art gallery and was responsible for hundreds of attributions
Matías Díaz Padrón, professor and art historian and former curator of the Prado Museum, an authority on seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch painting and Rubens, passed away this Wednesday at the age of 88, according to the art gallery where this wise man he developed the bulk of his career from Flemish painting. The museum expressed its sorrow for the death of the former Technical Advisor and Head of the Department of Conservation of Flemish Painting and Northern Schools until 1700 of the institution. He is an authority on the subject who drew up the first catalog raisonné of Flemish painting in the art gallery and was responsible for hundreds of attributions, two of them to Velázquez.
«For more than three decades he developed an enormous research and teaching activity, favoring, with his rigorous work and sensitive dedication, the best knowledge and conservation of one of the cardinal collections of the Prado, such as modern flamenco painting and, especially, the indelible imprint of Pedro Pablo Rubens and his circle”, was recognized in a statement from the museum directed by Miguel Falomir.
Born in 1935 in the town of Valverde, on the Canary Island of El Hierro, Díaz Padrón was a doctor in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid. Between 1967 and 1976 he held the chairs of History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Complutense and Autonomous Universities of Madrid. In 1970 he joined the Prado as a curator, where he was in charge of reviewing and studying the paint deposits, work that resulted in the discovery of numerous unpublished works.
catalog raisonné
In 1975 he published the first catalog raisonné of the Prado’s 17th-century Flemish painting collection, a monumental work that summarizes a quarter of a century of research and exhaustively lists the museum’s Flemish painting collection, undoubtedly the richest on the planet. Contains biographies of 150 17th century Flemish artists, including Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens, Brueghel, Boel and Fyt.
Rubens was the star of that gigantic work and his life is carefully documented. He deals with his two visits to Spain in 1603 and 1628 first as a diplomat and then as an artist. He also put an end to the myth of the artist’s workshop as a great pictorial industry. “We know -Díaz Padrón maintained- that Rubens worked alone and tirelessly and on many occasions under the gaze of the king”. He referred to the German master as “a dazzling figure who knows how to interpret the dreams of greatness of the last Habsburgs.”
In 1980 Díaz Padrón obtained the position of scientific collaborator of the Higher Council for Scientific Research and two years later that of curator of Flemish and Dutch Painting at the Prado.
Author of more than forty monographs and more than three hundred and fifty articles in specialized media, between 1989 and 1995 he taught doctoral courses at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He was a member of l’Académie Royale d’Archéologie et d’Historie de l’Art de Belgique and of the Real de San Miguel Arcángel de Santa Cruz de Tenerife and commander of the order of Leopold II of Belgium, and was awarded the medal of gold from the Government of the Canary Islands, the order of Andrés Bello from Venezuela and the order of the Ministry of Agriculture. In 2008, the Government of the Canary Islands awarded him the Prize for Historical Heritage and Research.
#Matías #Díaz #Padrón #great #authority #Rubens #dies