Museo Nacional del Prado
MADRID, SPAIN
If you round a corner and come face to face with the painting Third of May, Francisco Goya’s brutal depiction of the execution of Spanish patriots by Napoleon’s firing squad (page 162), do not be surprised if you get a few goose-bumps. Many spine-tingling moments are scattered throughout the Museo Nacional del Prado, or the Prado, in downtown Madrid, Spain. Etchings, paintings, and sculptures by the old masters such as Albrecht Dürer and Peter Paul Rubens hang alongside masterpieces by Hieronymus Bosch and Diego Velázquez. For those visitors with only a few hours to spend in the galleries, the Prado features “Highlights of the Collection” tour recommendations that provide a more concentrated visit of the museum’s “greatest hits.”
Façade of El Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.
Originally designed as the Natural History Cabinet in 1785, the building endured a number of changes until 1819, when the museum opened to the public as a showcase for the royal collection devoted to promoting Spanish art. During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, Republican government-sponsored agencies, functioning as “Red Cross units for art,” relocated the Prado’s collection for safekeeping in churches, basements, and other fortified structures across Spain; this was the one and only time Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas, has ever left the Prado. Currently, the museum's collection has grown to include 20,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and historical documents, but is only able to exhibit a small fraction of them. —SBR