Where the pictures came from, which is not conquest
Older accounts say the collection was drawn from paintings gathered by the Spanish nobility and that many works were acquired by conquest. Both are wrong, and the truth matters because it explains the shape of the place.
These are the Habsburg and Bourbon royal collections. Charles V and Philip II bought Titian directly and at length, which is why the Prado's Titians are the finest anywhere outside Venice. Philip IV bought on a scale that included the sale of Charles I's collection after the English Civil War, and employed Velázquez for most of his adult life, which is why the Velázquez room exists at all. Works arrived by purchase, by commission, by diplomatic gift and by inheritance. Very little of it was looted.
The painting the museum is for
Older accounts give star billing to Goya and El Greco and mention Velázquez once in passing. That inverts the building.
Velázquez's Las Meninas of 1656 is the reason the Prado is one of the handful of museums worth crossing a continent for. Everything about it is strange — where the painter has put himself, who is actually being painted, what the mirror at the back is doing, where the viewer is supposed to be standing — and the strangeness is the point rather than a curiosity. It has been argued about continuously for three and a half centuries. The surrounding rooms hold the rest of the court work: the portraits of Philip IV across a reign, the dwarfs and jesters painted with the same seriousness as the king, The Spinners, The Surrender of Breda, Christ Crucified.
Goya, and the two things to find
The Prado holds the largest Goya collection in the world, and it covers a career that began in tapestry designs and ended somewhere no painter had been before.
- The Second and Third of May 1808. The first is the charge of the Mamelukes in the Puerta del Sol; the second is the firing squad on the hill afterwards. They were painted six years after the event and they are the beginning of modern war painting — nobody before had put the viewer at the wrong end of the muskets. The rising they record started in the square a ten-minute walk from this building.
- The Black Paintings. Goya painted these on the plaster walls of his own house outside the city, the Quinta del Sordo, late in life, deaf and with no apparent intention of anybody seeing them. They were cut off the walls and transferred to canvas decades after his death, which is why they look the way they do. Saturn Devouring His Son is the one everyone knows.
Also here: The Clothed Maja and The Nude Maja, the family of Charles IV, and the tapestry cartoons from the start of his career, which are worth seeing immediately before the Black Paintings for the distance travelled.
The rest, in brief
- Bosch — The Garden of Earthly Delights, and The Seven Deadly Sins. Philip II bought them, which is a fact worth sitting with.
- The Italians — Titian above all, with Fra Angelico's Annunciation, Raphael, Tintoretto, Veronese, Caravaggio, Mantegna, Botticelli and Correggio.
- The Flemish and Dutch — Rubens in quantity, Van Dyck, Brueghel, and Rembrandt's Artemisia.
- The Spanish beyond Velázquez and Goya — El Greco, who worked in Toledo and whose greatest things are still there; Zurbarán; Ribera; Murillo.
- The nineteenth century, which spent years in storage and in the Casón del Buen Retiro, is now shown in the main building.
No route is given here, deliberately. The hang has been reorganised repeatedly and will be again; older accounts that walk the visitor through numbered rooms are describing a museum that no longer exists in that order. The museum publishes short itineraries of its own for an hour, two hours or three, and those are the ones to use.
The extension, which is finished
Older accounts describe disagreements over a new wing under construction and hope it will be resolved soon. It was resolved: Rafael Moneo's Jerónimos extension opened on 30 October 2007, and it is where a visitor now arrives. It holds the reception, the temporary exhibition galleries and an auditorium, and it re-erected the cloister of the Jerónimos monastery, stone by stone, inside a concrete shell. Its bronze doors are by Cristina Iglesias.
Two further pieces of the museum are worth knowing about because they explain things a visitor may wonder at.
- The Casón del Buen Retiro, the surviving ballroom of the old Buen Retiro palace, is no longer a gallery. It held the nineteenth-century collection, then Guernica from 1981 until 1992, and since 2007 it has been the Prado's study centre and library — open to researchers rather than visitors. Accounts sending the public there to see Sorolla are doubly wrong: his collection is at the Museo Sorolla, the painter's own house in Chamberí.
- The Salón de Reinos, the other surviving wing of the Buen Retiro palace, was the Army Museum until that moved to Toledo. It was transferred to the Prado and is being converted into a third building by Foster + Partners with Rubio Arquitectura. The work has run late and over budget and no opening date has been announced, so it is due later this decade and no more precisely than that.
Getting in
- Admission is charged, and the last two hours of every opening day are free. That applies on Sundays and weekdays alike now, which is a change from the patchwork older accounts describe.
- Paid tickets carry a time slot and should be booked in advance. Free tickets cannot be booked — they are issued at the ticket office on the day and capacity is limited, so the free window means a queue.
- Temporary exhibitions are half price during the free window.
- Various categories go free at any time, including under-eighteens, students, the unemployed and visitors with a disability, on production of proof at the desk.
- Shorter hours on 6 January, 24 and 31 December; closed 1 January, 1 May and 25 December.
General practicalities for the city are on the Madrid page.