Between Times or Antonius of Padua

She holds little Anthony of Padua almost tenderly in her hands and paints him with fine brushstrokes. I enjoy watching her do this and admire the dedication with which the young restorer brings the old plaster figure back to colorful life.

Private owners of such works of art also take advantage of our services and bring in family heirlooms, explains manager Cristina Silva to me as we look around Signin. The restoration store’s workspace resembles a small factory floor, and it’s also located far outside Braga’s historic city center in the Parque Industrial of Celeiros. It is flooded with light and appears almost clinical due to the bright whitewashed walls. All the more, the figures being restored seem somewhat lost on the unadorned work tables. Santa Lucia, the light-bringer from Syracuse, Anthony and Francis, and of course various sculptures of the Virgin Mary, including a sprawling radiate-wreathed Madonna are mostly restored, but some are still in progress with missing limbs and crumbling paint. Particularly irritating to me is the little baby Jesus lying on the hard tabletop instead of in a manger with straw. “Preservamos legados e memorias” is the motto of the company, founded in 2001, and I wonder if they manage to preserve these legacies and memories. Who today can still decipher this world of symbols, the eyes on the plate for Lucia, the queen on the crescent moon, the lily and the tonsure?

On the wall lean powerful paintings by the great painter Gregorio Lopes. They come from the Igreja de São João Baptista de Tomar, as the inscription indicates, and are to return there after the restoration. These works, like almost all of them, are financed mainly by private donations, since there is no extensive art funding from the state. I stand before the Last Supper and the Beheading of John and admire the perspective construction and fine execution by this Portuguese Renaissance and Mannerist master. A court painter to the kings, he died respected and famous at the time around 1550 in Lisbon and today his name has faded, even if the colors shine and we can learn more than ever about the paintings through a new process. After the guided tour, we leave the peculiar space where the group’s mission is “to preserve cultural heritage and open it up for the future,” as it says on the homepage.

On the way back to Braga, Cristina Silva sits next to me and we talk about the present, politics and current affairs in Europe. Somehow we are so between the times, she says, one feels and knows that many things are changing. But we don’t know where yet. And I think of the figures of the past and the young restorer with new paint for Antonius.