Prado Museum
A general overview

The Prado is the main museum and art gallery in Madrid. It features one of the world's finest collections of European art, including paintings from the 12th century through the early 19th century, based on the former Spanish Royal Collection. Founded as a museum of paintings and sculpture, it also contains important collections of more than 5,000 drawings, 2,000 prints, 1,000 coins and medals, and almost 2,000 decorative objects and works of art. Sculpture is represented by more than 700 works and by a smaller number of sculptural fragments.



With about 1,300 paintings on display, it could be confirm that Prado has easily the world's finest collection of Spanish painting, with large numbers of the finest works of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, as well El Greco, Bartolomé Estéban Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera and most other leading Spanish old masters. There are also large groups of important works by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (a personal favourite of King Philip II of Spain), Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Raphael, and Joachim Patiner. Fine examples of the works of Andrea Mantegna, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Veronese, Hans Baldung Grien, Fra Angelico, Van der Weyden and many other notable artists are also on display in the museum. The best known work on display at the museum is Las Meninas by Velázquez. Velázquez not only provided the Prado with his own works, but his keen eye and sensibility was also responsible for bringing much of the museum's fine collection of Italian masters to Spain. Pablo Picasso's renowned work, Guernica, was exhibited in the Prado upon its return to Spain after the restoration of democracy, but was moved to the Museo Reina Sofía in 1992 as part of a transfer of all works later than the early 19th Century to other buildings for space reasons.

The museum was opened in 1819. Upon the deposition of Isabella II in 1868, the museum was nationalized and acquired the new name of Museo del Prado. The building housed the royal collection of arts and it rapidly proved too small. The first enlargement to the museum took place in 1918. A war elephant from the church of San Baudelio de Berlanga, on display at the Romanesque chamberThe main building was enlarged with short pavillions in the back side (around 1900-60). The next enlargement was the incorporation of two buildings (nearby but not adjacent) into the institutional structure of the museum: the Casón del Buen Retiro which housed the bulk of 19th century art from 1971 to 1997, and the Salon de Reinos (Throne building), formerly Army Museum. The last enlargement (2007), designed by architect Rafael Moneo, is an underground building which connects the main building to another one entirely reconstructed. Very close to the Prado, the Villahermosa Palace houses the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, the bulk of whose collection was originally privately gathered and not part of the state collection, but which well serves to fill the gaps and weaknesses of the Prado's collection, such as Dutch and German painting; the Thyssen Bornemisza has been controlled as part of the Prado system since 1985.[2] During the Spanish Civil War, upon the recommendation of the League of Nations, the museum staff removed 353 paintings, 168 drawings and the Dauphin's Treasure and sent the art to Valencia, then later to Girona and finally to Geneva. The art had to be returned across French territory in night trains to the museum upon the commencement of World War II.