Museo del Prado
Spain's national art museum, holding the royal collection of European painting from the 12th century on.
The Museo del Prado occupies a neoclassical building designed by Juan de Villanueva in 1785, originally intended to house a natural history cabinet. The Peninsular War interrupted construction, and the building instead opened in November 1819 as the Royal Museum of Paintings and Sculptures. Its holdings grew out of the Spanish royal collection, which explains the exceptional depth of its Spanish, Italian and Flemish schools. Nationalised in 1868, it became the Museo Nacional del Prado and remains the principal repository of Spanish painting.
The collection numbers several thousand paintings alongside sculpture, drawings, prints and decorative arts, with Velazquez, Goya, El Greco, Titian, Rubens and Bosch represented in unusual strength. In 2007 an extension by Rafael Moneo added galleries, a cloister reassembled from the nearby church of San Jeronimo el Real, and space for temporary exhibitions. The museum also administers the Cason del Buen Retiro and the Salon de Reinos, and forms one point of the Paseo del Prado cultural axis inscribed by UNESCO in 2021.
Highlights
- Velazquez's Las Meninas, painted for Philip IV in 1656
- Goya's Black Paintings, transferred from his country house
- Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights
- Villanueva's neoclassical galleries and Moneo's 2007 extension
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