The Museo Nacional del Prado, located in Madrid, Spain, is one of the most important art galleries in the world, uniquely rich in paintings by European masters from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Its main attraction is the large presence of Velázquez, Goya (artist most widely represented in the collection), Titian and Rubens, who possesses the best collections that exist worldwide, to which must be added the collections authors as important as El Greco, Murillo, José de Ribera, Zurbarán, Raphael, Veronese, Tintoretto, Van Dyck and Hieronymus Bosch, to name only the most important. The usual limitations of space explaining that the museum displays a selection of top quality work (some 900 paintings) of more than 7,800 total you have in your inventory, and therefore be defined as "the greatest concentration of masterpieces square meter. " With the recent expansion of Rafael Moneo, the selection is expected to grow exposed to 50%, with 450 works más.
Like other major European museums, including the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence, the Prado owes its origin to the hobby collector of the ruling dynasties over the centuries. Reflects the personal tastes of the Spanish kings and their network of alliances and political enmities, and it is a skewed collection, unsurpassed in certain artists and styles, and weak in others. Only since the twentieth century is sought, with mixed results, address the most glaring absences.
Schools of painting in Spain, Flanders and Italy (especially Venice) have a leading role in the Prado, followed by the French fund more limited if it includes good examples of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. German painting has a batch code, with four works by Dürer and Mengs numerous portraits of main treasures. Along with a limited British repertory, almost limited to the genre of portrait painting, there are the Dutch, a section not too wide but includes a Rembrandt.
The Prado is not an encyclopedic museum in the style of the Louvre Museum, the National Gallery in London, or even (to a much smaller scale) the nearby Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, who have works in virtually all schools and periods. Is a strong and distinguished collection, consisting of a few kings fans Arts, where many works were created on request. The core of works from the Royal Collection has been complemented by subsequent contributions, which have hardly faded initial profile. Many experts consider a collection "of painters admired by painters' inexhaustible teaching new generations of artists, from Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec, who visited the museum in the nineteenth century to Picasso, Matisse, Dalí, Francis Bacon and Antonio Saura , who said: "This museum is the largest, but the most intense."
Although they are less known aspects, also has an important section of Decorative Arts (Treasure of the Dolphin) and with an outstanding collection of Greco-Roman sculptures. Along with the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofía, the Museo Nacional del Prado as the Triangle of Arts, a Mecca for many tourists from around the world. This area is enriched with other nearby institutions: the National Archaeological Museum, National Museum of Decorative Arts, the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and other small museums.