The famous portrait of Felipe II exposed in the Prado Museum It was not painted in 1565, but its creation must be delayed to 1573, because it has been proven that it is painted on the same canvas as the portrait of Ana of Austria. Oil The artillery general, that Traditionally it has been attributed to the Baroque painter Francisco Rizzi, it was really the work of Herrera El Mozo. And the copies that Rubens made of the paintings of Adam and Eve and He Rapture of Europe Tiziano were painted in Madrid and on canvases that came from the same cloth roll.
All these findings have been possible thanks to the use of software Aracnewhich analyzes the threads of the canvases to study the fabrics used in easel paint and thus determine the authorship, place and date of realization of a picture and its relationship with other works.
Aracne, a ten years of research at the University of Seville in collaboration with El Prado, arrives to facilitate life researchers and to feed the curiosity of the public. He Thorough study of fabrics On which the paintings were originally painted, they were originally impossible on many occasions, since the paintings had been resentied for their protection, so the paint layer covered the obverse and the new fabric the obverse.
He resentable It has been used in the painting on canvas of all countries for centuries, although in the case of Spain this practice was even greater, explains the Prado Museum in a statement. The reason: the fire that destroyed the Real Alcázar of Madrid during the reign of Felipe V in 1734, which spread rapidly and swept a large part of the works of art of the Royal Collection.
The saved had to resent and that assumes that, in most of the works that have been part of the Spanish Royal Collection, the original fabric used by the painter. And that process has ended up hiding some relevant data, such as authorship, place and date of realization and its relationship with other works.
Radiographing the Prado Museum Pictures
“The way we have to study the works is Through the radiography”, Explains Laura Alba, of the Technical Documentation Cabinet of the Prado Museum, in a video hung on the museum networks. Thus, classic painters normally used tissues made in a warp thread and a plot thread, or an Italian spike or diagonal fabric,” like that of the cowboy pants “, which the Italian painters like Tiziano used.
However, The Greco or Velázquez used fabrics with Drawings known as “tablecloth” fabricsbecause “they were really tablecloths that were used at the tables and that were reused to paint the paintings.”
In general, painters used fabrics manufactured for everyday use As white clothes, tents or ships of ships, made of manual looms with what the warp is characteristic of each of each loom and allows to determine if two fabrics came from the same roll.
As the workshops bought large amounts of cloth that were later cutting as they were working, it is possible to establish that several of them come from the same cloth roll, so the attribution must be the same and the date of completion as well, continues.
A technology open to the public
Aracne can be downloaded for free Through the website of the Prado Museum, which details the methodology of use and the origin of the project, in addition to some examples in which the intervention of this application has been capital, which aims to help specialists for a better knowledge of painting.
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