Museo del Prado

The Museo Nacional del Prado on the Paseo del Prado in Madrid is the principal Spanish national art museum and one of the great art museums of the world, housing the royal collections assembled by the Spanish Crown from the 16th century onward. The building, designed by architect Juan de Villanueva in the neoclassical style and completed in 1785, was initially planned as a natural sciences museum but was converted to an art gallery after the Peninsular War and opened to the public in 1819 under Ferdinand VII. The Prado's holdings span approximately 8,000 works on display and a total collection exceeding 20,000 works. Its strength in Spanish painting from the 12th to 19th centuries is unmatched anywhere. The ground-floor central rotunda contains Velazquez's Las Meninas (1656), the most discussed painting in the history of Western art, depicting the young Infanta Margarita surrounded by courtiers, dwarfs, and a dog, with the artist reflected in a background mirror. Adjacent rooms display The Surrender of Breda (1634-35) and a series of equestrian royal portraits. The Goya galleries on the first floor include the harrowing Saturn Devouring His Son and Witches' Sabbath from the Black Paintings series, originally painted directly onto the walls of Goya's house outside Madrid between 1819 and 1823 and transferred to canvas in 1874. The political canvases The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 are displayed nearby. El Greco's Adoration of the Shepherds and several major devotional canvases occupy dedicated gallery rooms. The Flemish and Dutch Masters holdings, assembled through the Habsburg family connection to Flanders, are the finest outside their countries of origin. Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights triptych — a favourite of Philip II — hangs alongside Roger van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross (c.1435). The Titian collection, built through multiple commissions by Charles V and Philip II, is the largest held by any single institution. Rubens and Fra Angelico are also strongly represented. The museum expanded with the Jeronimos building by Rafael Moneo in 2007 and maintains a programme of temporary exhibitions.