Spanish Museo del Prado art museum in Madrid, housing the world’s richest and most comprehensive collection of Spanish painting, as well as masterpieces of other schools of European painting, especially Italian and Flemish art. This gallery in Madrid has the most complete collection of Spanish painting from 18th centuries, and many masterpieces by great universal artists such as El Greco, Velzquez, Goya, Bosch, Tiziano, Van Dyck and Rembrandt.
The Museo del Prado is one of the buildings constructed during the reign of Charles III as part of a grandiose building scheme designed to bestow upon Madrid a monumental urban space. This “prado” (meaning meadow in Spanish) gave its name to the area (Saln del Prado, later Paseo del Prado), and later still to the Museum itself upon nationalisation.
The Prado contains over 9.000 works, mainly paintings, of which only about 1500 can be displayed at any one time. There is space in the museum dedicated to displaying on a rotational basis those works which are not on permanent exhibition. There are also conferences and courses in which archived works are often brought out. (information about these courses can be obtained from the Spanish culture. During the first excavations in the Odeon were found several statues of seated Musae, now in the Prado Museum in Madrid.
The entire southern wing of the 2nd floor is devoted to the works of Fransisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes. The Spaniard captured the extremes of hope and misery during and after the Napoleononic invasion with his works El Dos de Mayo and El Tres de Mayo. Escalante was a thoroughly Baroque painter, with an eye for the subtleties of color and light, and a daring craftsman. In 1667-68 he executed a series of paintings for the Merced Calzada of Madrid, some of which are preserved in the Prado Museum. The Prado Museum’s permanent collection is one of the largest in the world. It consists of about 9,000 paintings, 5,000 drawings, 2,000 prints, 1,000 coins and medals, and approximately 2,000 decorative objects. But seriously, it would be impossible for us to list all of the pieces that the museum holds in this page.
