Museo del Prado — museum
Emilio J. Rodríguez Posada · CC BY-SA 2.0

Museo del Prado

  • 1 min read
  • 40.414° N 3.692° W

Interesting facts

  • A copy of the Mona Lisa painted in Leonardo's own workshop, alongside the original, hangs here; its hidden landscape background was uncovered by restoration in 2011–2012.
  • Before it opened as a museum, Villanueva's unfinished building served Napoleonic troops as a cavalry headquarters and gunpowder store during the Peninsular War.
  • During the Spanish Civil War staff evacuated 353 paintings to Valencia, then Girona and finally Geneva, and the art returned by night trains as the Second World War began.
  • Goya's Black Paintings were murals on the walls of his country house; from 1874 they were painstakingly peeled off and transferred to canvas.
  • Goya is the most extensively represented artist in the collection, and Velázquez helped make its Italian holdings among the largest outside Italy.
  • The first catalogue of 1819 listed only 311 Spanish paintings, though the museum already held about 1,510 works from the royal residences.
  • Rafael Moneo's extension required the 16th-century Jerónimos cloister to be dismantled stone by stone and reassembled inside the new building.
  • The museum's name comes from the prado, or meadow, that once covered the ground where the Paseo del Prado now runs.
  • In 1991 Manuel Villaescusa left the museum nearly 40 million dollars in Madrid property, to be spent solely on buying paintings.
  • In 2009 the Prado released 14 masterpieces on Google Earth at extreme resolution, the largest image reaching about 14,000 megapixels.

Why it is worth it

The Prado is where the Spanish royal collection went public, and its strengths are the tastes of kings. The building was designed by Juan de Villanueva in 1785 for Charles III as a natural history cabinet; Ferdinand VII turned it into a royal museum of paintings and sculpture, which opened in November 1819 with the aim of showing that Spanish art could stand beside any other school. Habsburg and Bourbon collecting since Charles V gave it Titian, Rubens and Bosch in depth, and Velázquez himself, as court painter, bought Italian works for the king.

A first visit usually builds around three rooms of the imagination. Velázquez, above all Las Meninas, the most discussed painting of the 17th century. Goya in full range: the royal portrait of The Family of Charles IV, the two Majas, and the dark late works known as the Black Paintings, given to the museum in 1881. And the Netherlandish rooms with Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights and Rogier van der Weyden's The Descent from the Cross. El Greco, Dürer's self-portrait at the age of 26, Titian's equestrian Charles V and Rubens's Three Graces fill in the rest.

The collection is far larger than the walls: about 7,600 paintings, of which only a fraction is on show at any time. Rafael Moneo's extension, completed in 2007, enlarged the exhibition space to about 16,000 square metres. The Prado anchors the Paseo del Prado, and together with the Thyssen-Bornemisza and Reina Sofía museums it forms what Madrid calls its golden triangle of art; the Paseo del Prado was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021.

Getting there

The museum is on the Paseo del Prado in central Madrid, beside the Retiro park. The nearest metro stations are Banco de España (line 2) and Estación del Arte (line 1). The nearest airport is Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas (MAD), about 14 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Spain 150The Most Remarkable Museums in Spain 9The Most Remarkable 19th-Century Museums 12The Most Beautiful Buildings in Spain 18The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings 28The Most Remarkable Museums 93The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Museo del Prado, officially known as Museo Nacional del Prado, is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It houses collections of European art, dating from the 12th century to the early 20th century, based on the former Spanish royal collection, and the single best collection of Spanish art. Founded as a museum of paintings and sculpture in 1819, it also contains important collections of other types of works. The numerous works by Francisco Goya, the single most extensively represented artist, as well as by Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Diego Velázquez, are some of the highlights of the collection. Velázquez and his keen eye and sensibility were also responsible for bringing much of the museum's fine collection of Italian masters to Spain, now one of the largest outside of Italy.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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