MADRID, Spain — You’ve got an hour or two at a world-class museum, and no idea how to make the most of it. Here are the options: tour the highlights; follow a period, say, the Renaissance; or perhaps choose one artist.
The challenge is especially daunting when you’re faced with an abundance of riches like Madrid’s Prado, home to the world’s largest collections of Velazquez and Goya plus the work of great Spanish painters such as El Greco, Murillo, Ribera, Zurbaran, superb 16th- to 18th-century Italian masterpieces, and a wealth of Flemish and Dutch works. They total more than 8,000 paintings, an equal number of prints and drawings and more than a thousand sculptures.
To make viewing them easier for its 2 million yearly visitors, the Prado has undertaken a year-long reorganization of its holdings. It is rehanging its permanent collection to map a visitor-friendly path through its 10 centuries of art, making connections between artists, and illuminating much of its history through the portraits of the kings of Spain. All the facilities are being updated, and the entiremuseum is becoming totally handicap accessible.
“In general, we’re offering visitors a more logical route through the collection, starting from the 12th-century paintings to the latest. It’s like a thousand-year loop,” said Miguel Zugaza, director of the Prado. A few months ago he gave several journalists a preview of what the museum will look like in April.
We entered through the long-closed, colonnaded Velazquez Entrance on the Paseo del Prado, at the center of the elegant facade of the 200-year-old neo-classical building. It leads into the dramatic, semicircular scarlet lobby, created during the Prado’s 2007 expansion. Known as the Room of the Muses, it is named for the eight second-century Roman marble statues that rest on tall pedestals (the ninth Muse was lost).
Our first stop was up the north staircase to the second floor (called the first floor in Europe) and several small rooms where the museum’s treasured Venetian paintings by Bellini, Tintoretto, and especially a bonanza of Titians, now hang on startlingly beautiful, sapphire-blue walls. (I know, this is the Renaissance, not the 12th century, but trust the Prado’s plan.)
The route then follows the main hall, an arched gallery with a soaring, barrel-vaulted ceiling and strips of skylight, that runs the length of the museum. Here the walls are hung with great Spanish masters, among them Ribera and Murillo, and especially Velazquez, the star of the museum.
“This is the spine of the building, for the spine of the collection,” Zugaza said. “Veronese, Velazquez, Rubens - all sons of Titian. The heart of our collection is here in the center of the museum, with the large-scale paintings in a large-scale space.”
Zugaza stopped in the middle of the wide center hall. “We’re keeping favorite paintings in their current rooms so people can find them easily,” he said, referring to Velazquez’s beloved Las Meninas, the painting of the Infanta Margarita, her entourage and Velazquez in the Madrid Palace where he was court painter to King Philip IV. It is usually in the big ovalgallery (Room 12) just off the long hall and above the Room of the Muses, but until June it will hang in the center of the hall. Still remaining in its usual spot (Room 32) at the far end of the hall, is Goya’s The Family of Charles IV, in which the king looks unnervingly like George Washington.
Here the route returns to the entrance floor for Goya’s later works, among them, his two great paintings of the Madrid uprising that started the Spanish War of Independence: The Second of May 1808: The Battle against the Mamelukes and The Third ofMay 1808 in Madrid: Shootings at Principe Pio.
The final leg of the “thousand year loop” covers the museum’s collection of 19thcentury painting and sculpture, which had barely been seen before; it is now part of the permanent display for the first time.
Now back at the Room of the Muses, Zugaza reminded us that the itinerary is by no means obligatory; it’s just a new and logical way to put the extraordinary treasures of the Prado in historical context. And for those who just want to see the highlights, or the Renaissance, or the Goyas, a floor plan is available at the desk.
If you have time and you’re interested in seeing the Prado’s recent expansion - an architectural tour de force - the Room of the Muses leads into the new wing. It was designed by Rafael Moneo, a Pritzker prizewinning Spanish architect, who created a deceptively simple extension behind the main, 18th-century Villanueva building, named for the original architect. The modest, rectangular brick facade, with massive bronze doors and one large, mullioned window of the new Jeronimos building, can’t be seen from the Paseo del Prado; the wow factor is all inside. Two floors of color-coded rooms for temporary exhibitions are pierced by a large, central, glass-sided well that lets light in from the glasscovered roof.
The crowning glory is the top floor: the cloister of the adjacent 16th-century San Jeronimo church, whose 2,820 stones were dismantled, restored and painstakingly re-assembled in their exact original location. The 237,000-square-foot extension opened in late 2007.
Moneo’s array of ingenious architectural solutions vastly increased the Prado’s exhibition areas and liberated 25 galleries in the original Villanueva building by moving such museum facilities as restoration studios and storage areas to the new extension, leaving the original building entirely to art.Previously, only a fraction of the holdings could be shown at a time. Even some Prado employees hadn’t seen all of the museum’s treasures.
“The new wing freed up 25 percent of the space, which amounts to 400 to 500 paintings,” Zugaza said, “and we’re utilizing that space to show more pictures. Now there are a thousand works on display, and by 2012, when we’ve completed all the changes, there will be 1,400 to 1,500.”
Now you see why the new itinerary is needed and so welcome.
Prado Museum, Paseo del Prado;
. Open daily, except Mondays, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is about $8.75; free daily, 6-8 p.m. and Sundays, 5-8 p.m. Timed entry tickets can be bought online, which bring a small savings in price and ensure faster entry.
Travel, Pages 52 on 03/21/2010