For two of my former colleagues at the Prado (where I worked until 2015), both in their mid-fifties like me, Covid-19 proved fatal.Īt the gallery we quickly metamorphosed into an online museum and ramped up our digital offering. Immediately afterwards, all six of us in my household went down with the virus in quick succession, but mercifully it proved to be not much more than a couple of days in bed and, for me, not being able to relish the early morning aroma of Illy coffee from the tin for a few weeks, combined with that clingy exhaustion that has proved more difficult to shake off. Within five days we were on national lockdown. Dozens of National Gallery paintings were trapped in exhibitions in museums across the world, which had also had to close at short notice. We all burst into spontaneous applause.Ī successful year at the National Gallery came to a sudden halt, with the Titian Poesie exhibition-the dream show that had seemed like an impossible ambition even a few months earlier-cruelly curtailed, the Artemisia and Raphael exhibitions postponed, the gallery doors shut and all the staff sent home. I was grateful for their commitment and was very much looking forward to seeing them again soon. We had to close the gallery because of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic and we weren’t sure for how long. At the end of the day on Wednesday 18 March, I gathered all the gallery assistants on the mosaic staircase to address them before they went to change out of their uniforms.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |