Biography

Cristina Morilla is a paintings conservator at the Harvard Art Museums, specializing in medieval and early modern European art. Her work moves between conservation practice, technical art history, and color science, always asking what cultural interpretation owes to material evidence. Lately, she's been drawn to mural paintings detached from their original walls — objects caught between two histories, material and cultural — and to what that displacement means for how we care for them. Her recent writing traces histories of materiality: how Lluís Borrassà named and used blue pigments in medieval Catalonia (2024), or how transfer techniques shaped Pantoja de la Cruz's portrait of Philip III (2020) — always circling back to the same question: what do surfaces tell us that documents can't?

Project Summary

Between the 1920s and 1930s, an expanding art market, weak heritage protections, and Spain's political turmoil sent countless works of art across the Atlantic. Among them were the thirteenth-century murals of San Pedro de Arlanza, physically cut from their walls and shipped to American museums.

This research follows those fragments — now scattered across the Harvard Art Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, — to ask a question rarely posed: what did removal actually do to these paintings, materially?

The Italian teams who performed the strappo technique trained Spanish restorers in turn, while Harvard's own directors, Edward Forbes and Paul Sachs, later applied the same method to Asian murals — linking Arlanza to a much wider story of institutional practice.

Combining archival research across three countries, technical analysis, technical imaging and comparative study of fresco (and secco) techniques, the project reconstructs how these murals were transformed by displacement, and argues for conservation approaches that recognize this history not as damage to be corrected, but as evidence embedded within the object's material identity.