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Museo Nacional del Prado
Babble On. | Login
Babble On. | Login
0:13:38
Views: 460
Channels: PaintingRenaissance ArtSpanish Language
Themes: Learning to Look
The reorganization of the works on display in the Museo del Prado has been the principal Project
undertaken by the Museum over the past few years, starting in 2009. Following the inauguration of expansion
the Museum recovered a series of galleries in the original, Villanueva Building.
In addition, it was decided that a visit to the collections should start in the middle of the
building and not at each end, as has traditionally been the case.
Another factor was the decision to bring the nineteenth-century collections to the Villanueva Building
as these had previously been housed separately in the Casón del Buen Retiro.
The aim was thus to create a route around the building that ran from classical Roman sculpture
through Romanesque painting and on to the nineteenth century, an idea that represented
a considerable challenge.
Our aim was to impose a certain order on a visit the Museum. The route now starts in the centre
of the building and moves north towards the Goya Entrance where the oldest parts of the
collection are displayed, namely Romanesque, Medieval and Renaissance painting.
Moving up one floor and following a loop, the visitor next encounters Venetian painting,
primarily Titian, which is crucial not only for the Prado’s collections but for the development
of European and Spanish painting, particularly in the seventeenth century.
What we are presenting today is thus the completion of the work recently carried out on
the first floor, which is the Museum’s principal floor. This is where the most celebrated gallery is
located, which you can see behind me, known as the Central Gallery and designed by the architect
Juan de Villanueva in the late eighteenth century.
Villanueva did not design it to house paintings but it functions magnificently for the display
of large-format works. For this reason we decided to orientate the principal axis
of the collections around this central space, which marks the heart of Villanueva’s building.
By this I am referring to the part of the collection that runs from Titian
to Rubens and Velázquez and ends with a view through to Goya.
The new arrangement of the collection is more closely related to the history of the Museum itself.
The Prado is completely different to most European and American museums in that
it was not created with the intention of assembling an encyclopaedic collection
that should ideally represent the entire history of art.
Rather, it is the heir to the former Spanish royal collection,
assembled by the monarchs on the basis of their particular tastes and preferences.
The first painter to be systematically and indeed compulsively collected by the Spanish kings was Titian
whose work constitutes the corner-stone of the old Royal Collection in the sense that the Spanish monarchs
collected the works of those painters whose aesthetic came closest to the values embodied by Titian.
They thus firstly focused on the other sixteenth-century Venetian painters
who are so magnificently represented in the Prado, such as Jacopo Tintoretto,
Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Bassano, followed by the seventeenth-century artists who came to
be seen as Titian’s artistic heirs, namely Rubens, Van Dyck and above all Velázquez.
This group of artists constituted the core of the old Royal Collection and continues to be the
nucleus of the present-day Museo del Prado.
It is now displayed in the Museum’s most celebrated and emblematic space, the Central Gallery,
specifically in the two long arms of this t-shaped space.
Displayed in one arm is the work of Rubens and in the other that of Titian and the
sixteenth-century Venetian painters, while running down from the middle is the room
known as the Basilical Gallery, Room 12, which is probably the sancta sanctorum of the Prado as
it houses the work of Velázquez. This new display thus establishes an ideal relationship
between the work of the three painters.
The Prado’s collection of Venetian painting is the largest and finest in the world.
Two criteria were followed for their new display, one of them perhaps rather symbolic,
which was that of displaying works of outstanding artistic and iconographic
importance in the Central Gallery. The most telling example is to be seen in the central
section of the Gallery where Las Meninas is displayed in juxtaposition with
Titian’s Charles V on Horseback at Mühlberg, a work that was considered in its time
to be the masterpiece of the royal collections and which was enormously influential.
This new location is not a fanciful one, and the canvas has been hung as close as possible
to Rubens’s equestrian portraits that are now to be seen in the south section of the Gallery
as well as to Velázquez’s equestrian portraits on display in Room 12.
One of the leading artists represented in this section of the gallery is Jacopo Tintoretto
and the work that can probably be considered his masterpiece, Christ washing the Disciples’ Feet,
can be seen behind me.
In it, Tintoretto went against the Venetian tradition, of which Veronese was the finest
exponent, in that he arranged the figures to recede into depth throughout the entire
composition rather than aligning them in a frieze-like manner across the foreground.
In addition, Tintoretto used a high viewpoint that allowed for the creation
of a sense of profound spatial depth into which he set the figures.
Among the works on display by Jacopo Bassano, an artist who enjoyed enormous fame
in his own lifetime, is Vulcan’s Forge, which is an outstanding example of
late Cinquecento Venetian painting.
In this display I have also aimed to give visual form to the idea underlying the
Central Gallery, which is the link between Titian and the painters
who saw themselves as his heirs some decades later.
In this sense it is particularly interesting to see the juxtaposition between Titian's Adam and Eve
a work painted for Philip II’s Secretary of State, Antonio Pérez, and the copy of it that Rubens
painted during his time in Spain.
We are now in the three rooms devoted to El Greco, and the Prado undoubtedly has the
the largest and most important collection of this artist’s work.
Here our intention has been to display key masterpieces from among our collection of his
work in order to articulate the guiding thread in a display that is primarily chronological.
This gallery, for example, principally focuses on large-format works and is presided over by
Altarpiece of Doña María de Aragón, which was El Greco’s only important commission produced in Madrid.
Five paintings from that ensemble are to be seen here, including the Annunciation or
the Incarnation, which was the central episode in the altarpiece.
This gallery also has works that represent some of El Greco’s most important iconographic
innovations, through which he contributed to the devotional imagery of seventeenth-century
Spain, particularly with his penitential images such as Saint Jerome, Christ embraced on
the Cross and Saint Sebastian, the latter another of El Greco’s great creations and one that follows
Venetian models.
Among the new features in this display of the artist’s work is the manner in which the portraits
are now presented
They were previously arranged to form a compact group that was certainly visually attractive
Now, however, we have hung portraits from his final period in this gallery next to El Greco's last
work, the masterpiece of The Adoration of the Shepherds that includes a self-portrait of the
kneeling artist as one of the shepherds adoring the Christ Child.
These male sitters wear the large ruffs that were still worn at this point in Philip III’s reign.
Opposite them are some of the works from the “Almadrones Apostles Series”, which also reveal
El Greco’s ability to create lively, portrait-like images, this time of the Apostles.
We are now in Room 12, the heart of the Museum and the central gallery both with regard to the
layout of the building and its symbolic topography.
This is the place where Velázquez’s work has been displayed since 1899.
The new display of the Prado’s collections has taken account of two key factors: firstly that
of Velázquez as an international painter who engaged in an artistic dialogue with the work
of the sixteenth-century Venetian painters and the seventeenth-century Flemish painters,
and secondly, Velázquez’s status as the reference point for the construction of the idea of
Spanish painting
Converging on the Velázquez galleries from the two sections of the Central Gallery are, from one
side, the works of Titian, Veronese and Titian,
and from the other, those of Rubens and Van Dyck
Also joining up with Room 12 are the interior galleries devoted to El Greco, Zurbarán, Ribera,
Murillo and the Madrid painters of the second half of the seventeenth century
Large-format works by Rubens have been hung in the south half of the Central Gallery
This is for two principal reasons, the first related to the history of art
From his own day onwards Rubens was considered one of the great names in European art
This was for a number of reasons: he was one of the great conduits of classical culture,
he was painter to monarchs and emperors during his lifetime, and he was the heir to a tradition
of the artist as a socially elevated figure who ensured that painting would be highly regarded
in the future, primarily continuing the heritage of Titian in this respect.
For reasons relating to the Prado’s particular history, the Museum possesses the finest
collection of Rubens’s work worldwide
The paintings have been organised primarily by subject matter, with different walls devoted to
religious painting, equestrian portraits and history painting, mythological narratives
and mythological nudes
The Prado’s collection of Rubens is a spectacular one and includes more than 90 works by his hand
This display only includes 20 large-format works and 10 small oil sketches, representing less than
a third of our total holdings of his work
The paintings on display here are numerous and large and it is important to bear in mind that
the seventeenth century, the century of Rubens, was one that placed great importance on impact,
on intensifying the relationship with the viewer and on the painting’s capacity to impress and convince
One of the means to achieve this effect was through the size of the work and the reason
that this area contains numerous large paintings that fill the walls to a greater extent
than they do in other parts of the Museum is that Rubens was a product of his time.
Rubens was the heir to Titian in two senses
firstly and fundamentally because he was the great painter to monarchs and emperors
and the most socially elevated painter of his day, offering a role model for other artists to achieve
this social status, as was indeed the case in later centuries when painters became great figures in
in European society
This display includes works by Rubens from every period of his caree, arranged by size
rather than chronologically
Among them are works from the outset of his career including the first work by the artist
to be acquired by the Spanish monarch and which was painted in Spain, namely the
Portrait of the Duke of Lerma of 1603, and also works from the end of the artist’s career
that he painted for Philip IV to decorate Madrid royal residences in the 1630s
We also see paintings by Rubens that remained in the artist’s own collection
and which Philip IV bought from Rubens’s widow and heirs after the artist’s death
In addition, there are works in which Rubens reveals himself as the great conduit
for classical mythology, able to imagine and represent the great heroes of European culture
Finally, we see paintings created for the pure pleasure of depicting nudes, particularly the
female nude, as well as dynastic portraits that can be closely related to the rest of the Prado's
collection, such as the Equestrian Portrait of the Cardinal Infante.
In conclusion, this display offers a comprehensive overview of the genres in which Rubens worked
while also conveying the nature of the most important European painting of the time.
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