Pedro Berruguete’s Annunciation, painted around 1485–1490, was known for more than a century almost exclusively through a photograph taken in 1916. The oil-on-panel work from the Arburua collection came to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum on a five-year loan and was unveiled on 20 May 2025 after extensive research and conservation. A little-known work by one of the major painters of the Spanish Renaissance thereby returned to public and scholarly view.nnThe panel is thought to have belonged to a larger altarpiece devoted to the Life of the Virgin, possibly made for a church in the Palencia region.
Berruguete combines northern European precision with an Italian Renaissance understanding of space: a perspectival interior, close attention to fabric and wood, gilded ornament and a restrained narrative coexist in the same scene. Oxidised varnish and earlier interventions, however, had obscured many of those qualities.nnThe campaign, carried out between September 2024 and March 2025, began with X-radiography, infrared reflectography and ultraviolet examination.
Conservators found cracks and insect holes in the panel, lifting paint, scratches, a network of heat- or candle-related craquelure, losses, darkened varnish and heavy dirt. They consolidated the surface, removed discoloured coatings and grime under controlled conditions, filled losses and reintegrated colour with reversible materials.nnCleaning recovered the Virgin’s halo, rays around the dove of the Holy Spirit, gold ornament and the depth of the room.
The project combined Pilar Silva Maroto’s art-historical study, Elisa Mora Sánchez’s work on the paint surface, Mayte Camino Martín’s treatment of the gilding and coordination by José Luis Merino Gorospe. Although the story has circulated again under a 6 June dateline, the museum’s official record places the display between 20 May and 30 September 2025—an important correction for the historical record.
