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Analysis and study of the preservation of the pictorial series ‘The 12 tribes of Israel and/or the children of Jacob’, of the University Museum Casa de los Dédicos, Benemérita Autonomous University of Puebla (MUCM-BUAP)

Abstract

The collection "The Twelve Tribes of Israel or The Sons of Jacob" consists of twelve paintings in a normal human size, in which Judah does not come along with the rest of them since the last inventory in 1932. The serie represents Jacob and his twelve sons that illustrate the biblical passage of the Genesis, the Blessings of Jacob. The painting is attributed to Francisco de Zurbaran who born in Fuente de Cantos in 1598 and died in Madrid in 1664. He was a magnificent painter of the Spanish Golden Age, and a master of the Sevillian School style of painting from the 17th century. Zurbaran sent his serie from The Iberian Peninsula to New Spain in the seventeenth century. The work was commissioned by the Jesuits to the Espiritu Santo College. The iconography represented is unusual in easel painting. There are only five groups known around the world, in which Francisco de Zurbaran or his workshop painted two of them. One of them is at the Castle of Auckland in England, and the other one is at the University Museum Casa de los Muñecos of The Benémerita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (MUCM-BUAP), Mexico. Both of them were committed to New Spain, nevertheless, only one is in Puebla. The restoration began on September the second 2016 and ended on September 2017. A year after this project, the exhibition room was inaugurated by showing the paintings mentioned before to the public. The oil paintings presented weakened supports, horizontal cracking of winding, loss of generalized pictorial layers, darkened and yellowed varnish, with accumulation of dust and excreta of insects, bagged canvases and previous erroneous interventions. Due to the weakness substrates, a fixing and consolidation proposal was implemented. The method used a “Gacha” adhesive, which has been used in Spain since the 17th century; Mariano de la Roca describes it in the book “The Art of painting, its antiquity and greatness”. The treatment applied offered good results because of the compatibility and reversibility of materials that guarantee the good conservation of pictures, complying the international precepts and principles of reversibility, by respecting the original one with a minimal intervention. After this treatment, the consolidation of the supports is achieved, as well as favoring the potential unity of the work with pictoric layer cleaning and color reintegration. This article describes the collection, its importance, the analysis of its conservation, as well as the treatments applied and the restoration of the serie “The Sons of Jacob”. These treatments are always assigned according to the principles of minimal intervention, reversibility and respect for the historical and aesthetic data.

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