Director’s Foreword

Reynolds, Jock

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Director’s Foreword

Jock Reynolds

The Young Velázquez: The Education of the Virgin Restored

~The opportunity to redesign, renovate, and reinstall the three-building complex that is now the Yale University Art Gallery brought with it, a little over ten years ago, an equally important opportunity to review and reconsider nearly the entirety of our historic collections, now numbering in excess of 200,000 works of art. Fresh pairs of curatorial eyes...

Author

Jock Reynolds

PublisherYale University Art Gallery

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00167.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-19534

Director’s Foreword

The opportunity to redesign, renovate, and reinstall the three-building complex that is now the Yale University Art Gallery brought with it, a little over ten years ago, an equally important opportunity to review and reconsider nearly the entirety of our historic collections, now numbering in excess of 200,000 works of art. Fresh pairs of curatorial eyes examined paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects, many of which had not been considered with adequate attention to their qualities or blemishes in generations, in some cases not for a century or more. Many wonderful discoveries emerged from this process. Paintings by Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Titian, and van Dyck that we knew we owned but had not realized were by these stellar masters, and others by Bellotto, Stubbs, Linnel, or Cabanel that had always been fully recognized but never much appreciated, now have pride of place on the walls in our permanent-collection galleries. But none of these pleasant surprises can compare to the amazement we all felt when it was proposed to us that the beautiful but damaged Education of the Virgin that had long been inventoried in our storerooms as “anonymous Spanish, seventeenth century,” might actually be the earliest-known major altarpiece by Diego Velázquez, a discovery that caused a flurry of excitement and debate when it was announced publicly in the summer of 2010.

The Education of the Virgin emerged slowly out of obscurity. Photographic records document its installation in the Yale School of the Fine Arts in the nineteenth century, hanging high on a wall amid an assortment of plaster casts as models for students to copy. More than one attempt to clean it was begun and abandoned over the first half of the twentieth century, but no serious attention was devoted to it until the winter of 2002–3, when Laurence Kanter, our newly appointed Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art, placed it on a list of works of sufficiently high quality and interest to justify further study, cleaning, and restoration, and possible installation in the new galleries then being planned. Shortly afterward, John Marciari joined the Department of Early European Art as the Nina and Lee Griggs Associate Curator of European Art, and he quickly selected the Education of the Virgin from this “to-be-conserved” list as deserving of special attention. The rest of the story, as they say, is now history. There followed six years of research and preliminary conservation work, leading to John’s publication of the painting four years ago, in 2010. The appearance of his article—after which we displayed the painting partially cleaned in our galleries—sparked a lively public debate that brought the painting to the attention of specialists and amateurs worldwide.

It was at this point that Banco Santander approached us with the exceedingly generous offer of sponsoring the complete conservation of the Education of the Virgin, fully aware of how complicated and involved a project this would be. It was their unflinching support that enabled our Susan Morse Hilles Chief Conservator, Ian McClure, to engage the services of Carmen Albendea to collaborate with him in bringing this ambitious project to a positive and timely conclusion, transforming an imposing but scarred and difficult-to-read canvas into that which we now believe it to be: a monument of the emerging genius of the greatest painter of Spain’s Golden Age, Diego Velázquez. Their work, not only in recovering the hidden beauties of this captivating painting but also in drawing on and adding to the wealth of physical information available about Velázquez’s technique in his early Sevillian period, is carefully detailed in their essay in this catalogue and will surely remain a fundamental contribution to Velázquez studies for a long time to come.

Finally, it is crucial to acknowledge the erudition and the infectious enthusiasm of our colleague in Seville, Benito Navarrete Prieto, whose tenacious determination to restore the Education of the Virgin to its rightful place in the canon of classical Spanish art as well as in the cultural legacy of his adoptive home is truly the genesis of this unique exhibition and catalogue. His hospitality, eloquence, and passionate commitment, all supported without wavering by the mayor of Seville and his entire cultural staff, made the hypothetical possibility of our collaboration a reality. I am sure I speak for the entire staff of the Yale University Art Gallery, for our Governing Board, and for the President and Officers of the University when I say that this is a collaboration of which we are, and will long be, most proud.

Jock Reynolds
The Henry J. Heinz II Director
Yale University Art Gallery

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