A Velázquez painting will be cloned for permanent display in the artist's birthplace

At the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, work on a clone has just begun: to be cloned will be a painting by Diego Velázquez, the Old Woman Frying Eggs. The goal, then, is to create a facsimile of the work, indistinguishable to the naked eye from the original, for permanent display in Velázquez’s birthplace in Seville, which will be open to the public from 2021.

It is a painting completed in 1618, when the artist was just nineteen years old, thus at the beginning of his artistic career. Museum technicians have dismantled the work’s frame and are in the process of digitizing it in high-resolution 3D color: state-of-the-art digital technology is being used for this purpose in order to obtain accurate data of the original. At the end of these operations, the clone of the Old Woman Frying Eggs will be made in the rooms of Factum Arte in Madrid through a combination of new technologies and traditional craft techniques. The digital information obtained will also be useful in providing documentation on the conservation status of the work.

Satisfied was the director of the National Galleries of Scotland, Aidan Weston-Lewis, for contributing to the start-up of the Velázquez Birthplace, which aims to give visitors an understanding of the life and art of the famous Sevillian painter.

Enrique Bocanegra, head of the project to launch the Velázquez Birthplace, said, “The goal is clear: that Seville will recover Velázquez’s legacy. The most important works he created in the city where he was born and where he trained as an artist have been outside of Spain for centuries, housed in major museums around the world, but thanks to 21st-century technology we can create paintings identical to the originals that even Velázquez himself would not be able to tell apart and that will remain on permanent display in his birthplace, re-establishing the link between Seville and its most illustrious son.”

The initiative is a collaboration of CEEH - Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, Factum Arte and Velázquez’s birthplace.

A Velázquez painting will be cloned for permanent display in the artist's birthplace

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