José de Figueiredo Laboratory

The José de Figueiredo Laboratory is the national reference laboratory for the conservation and restoration of movable cultural property in Portugal. Based in Lisbon, on Rua das Janelas Verdes, in a purpose-built building adjoining the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, it brings together intervention studios and scientific laboratories where, for more than a century, paintings, sculptures, textiles, furniture and other testimonies of the national artistic heritage have been studied and treated.

From the museum’s workshops to an autonomous institute

The history of this institution is inseparable from that of the material study of art in Portugal itself. In 1911, José de Figueiredo (1872–1937), art historian and first director of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, set up a restoration workshop at the museum and invited the painter Luciano Freire to take charge of conserving the works in the collection. It was a pioneering gesture: for the first time, restoration ceased to be an occasional task and became a permanent activity tied to the museum institution itself.

In the following decades, under the management of the physicist Manuel Valadares, the workshop acquired laboratory equipment — including an X-ray tube — and came to be known as the “Laboratory for the Examination of Works of Art”. The introduction of scientific methods of analysis marked a qualitative leap: radiography, photography and physico-chemical examinations made it possible to read layers invisible to the naked eye, to distinguish earlier interventions and to ground treatment decisions on solid evidence.

Restoration ceased to be a craft of the hands and became also a discipline of the laboratory, in which diagnosis precedes and justifies the intervention.

A building for restoration

It fell to the director João Couto to grasp that the growth of the activity required dedicated spaces. The building, designed by the architect Guilherme Rebelo de Andrade from concepts developed by Figueiredo, Valadares, Couto and Fernando Mardel, was built between 1938 and 1940. According to Couto, it was an “Institute of Restoration in its own home, in a building specially built for that purpose, a unique case in the world” — a claim that reflects the ambition to make conservation an autonomous field, with workshops, laboratories and training capacity.

Institutional autonomy came in 1965 when, at the initiative of the conservator and painter Abel de Moura, the workshops and the photographic, physics and chemistry laboratories emancipated themselves from the museum’s authority and gave rise to the José de Figueiredo Institute (Decree-Law no. 46,758 of 18 December 1965). For decades, the institute was an international reference in the treatment of delicate works, from panel painting to centuries-old tapestries.

Continuity and heritage

In 2000, the José de Figueiredo Institute was abolished and its functions passed to the newly created Portuguese Institute for Conservation and Restoration. Successive reorganisations of the heritage administration then integrated this remit into the central structures of the State, culminating in its current oversight by the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage and Património Cultural, I.P. The laboratory has kept the name that honours José de Figueiredo, perpetuating the link between historical-artistic study and technical practice.

More than an administrative structure, the José de Figueiredo Laboratory is a landmark of conservation and restoration in Portugal: within it, generations of technicians were trained and the profession of conservator-restorer was consolidated, founded on the principle that each intervention must be reversible, documented and underpinned by scientific examination. Its workshops continue to host campaigns to study and treat major works of the national heritage, ensuring that central pieces of Portuguese art reach future generations in a condition to be understood and admired.