Favila, the author of the most notable sculpture in Avilés –based on the painting that Juan Carreño de Miranda made of the girl Eugenia Martínez Vallejo in 1680–, yesterday expressed his support for eliminating the nickname “The Monster” from his creation, willing since 1997 in Sabugo, at the intersection of La Estación and Carreño Miranda streets. “It’s a question of dignity,” he stressed. “Now what I have to think about is how to do it: the name is carved on the foot,” said the Moscow artist who feels like a celebration that the piece that the Ayala company donated to the Avilés City Council has become a hallmark of the council: no tourist passing through the old fishing district passes by.
Fragment of the painting “Eugenia Martínez Vallejo, dressed”
“It’s true that when we installed it I don’t remember anyone protesting the name,” the artist acknowledges, looking back three decades. “But it is also true that when we launched the ‘Eugenia Project’ with the Factory we opted for this name: for Eugenia. The city and I feel great affection for the sculpture,” he stressed. “And if the Prado Museum has removed it, we also have to remove it,” he concluded.
Favila refers to the fact that the National Pinacoteca reported last January that it had reviewed 1,800 cartouches of as many paintings and sculptures that it guards and that it had done so prompted by Parliament’s decision to eliminate the term “disabled” from the Constitution, something that had been approved just a few days before.
This revision affected, among others, the portrait “Eugenia Martínez Vallejo, ‘La Monstrua'”, which these days – until June 2 – can be seen in the Niemeyer dome as a result of the “The art that connects” program promoted by Telefónica and El Prado itself. The general coordinator of conservators at the Pinacoteca Nacional, Víctor Cageao, said in the pages of LA NEW SPAIN: “Neither I, nor the Prado Museum, like the name ‘The Monster’. It is a bit aggressive for a girl “. The critic Luis Feás was in favor of the works maintaining “the title with which they were baptized, without excessive modesty, neat, without going overboard with glazes,” he determined. There is no evidence that Carreño called her “The Monster.”
The painting officially – as stated in the Niemeyer papers – is called “Eugenia Martínez Vallejo, dressed.” Óscar Yugo, who is the vice president of the Spanish Association for Prader-Willi Syndrome (AESPW) – the disease that the model of the painting supposedly suffered from – applauded the decision of the Prado Museum: “It is necessary to abandon the names that were used posteriori,” he said. And the thing about “The Monster” appears for the first time when the painting by Carreño de Miranda enters the catalog of the Prado Museum (that happened in 1827). “We are talking about a disease that affects one birth in every twenty or twenty-five thousand. It causes excessive appetite and, consequently, obesity… It does not seem that the best way to educate children is to summarize everything in ‘The Monster'” .
: “It is a question of dignity”){kind=link}