Spain, special technology at Reina Sofía Museum to protect Picasso's "Guernica" from fire

What could happen to one of the most celebrated masterpieces in the history of art, Guernica by Pablo Picasso (Malaga, 1882 - Mougins, 1973), if the venue that houses it, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, was engulfed in a fire? We all have in mind the images of the devastation that flames caused a few days ago at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, and we can all imagine that, for a painting of such major proportions as Guernica (measuring 3.49 meters by 7.77 meters, weighing more than 200 kilograms) there would be little escape: it would be impossible to pull it to safety quickly. So, for the past two years the Reina Sofía has been working on technology aimed at saving its masterpieces from fire.

An article published yesterday in El País explains the museum’s security research. “We have established an innovative protocol that contemplates the operational actions of evacuation and rescue of works of art,” Javier Pinto, the architect in charge of the PROCOERS project, a research conducted by the museum together with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and financed, starting in 2016, by the Ministry of Economy (the total cost of the operation will amount to about 400,000 euros), explained to the Spanish newspaper. The project aims to create software based on GIS (Geographic information system) technology, the same technology Google uses for Google Maps when it needs to calculate the best route to a given destination. “The innovation,” Pinto explains, “is not the technology, but its application in the context of protecting the museum’s collections.”

Specifically, experts at the Reina Sofía have saved in a database all the information related to the museum’s floor plan, which will be monitored in real time by the system: in case of risk, notifications will be sent to technicians and, above all, the best route for evacuation will be indicated on mobile devices. The effectiveness of this system lies in the time savings it will be able to guarantee in case of evacuation: it has been calculated that it will take as much as ten minutes less time to get Guernica to safety. “Such a special work needed maximum effectiveness in evacuation,” said Jorge García Gómez-Tejedor, head of the Reina Sofía’s restorers. The danger of the work’s destruction is thus significantly reduced: and then consider, El País concludes, that the museum has always refused to loan the painting because of its delicacy.

Pictured: Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937; oil on canvas, 349.3 x 776.6 cm; Madrid, Museo Reina Sofía

Spain, special technology at Reina Sofía Museum to protect Picasso's "Guernica" from fire

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