Another in the Abbeville's Tiny Folios series, this little book is a real gem. If you've never been to the Prado Museum in Madrid, you have been blissfully unaware of all you've been missing. One look at this survey of the collection, and you'll be scouring the papers for cheap fares to Spain. Known for housing some of the finest works by Goya, El Greco, and Velazquez, the scope and variety of work--Titian, Rubens, and Bosch to mention only a few--is amazing. Most of the works in the museum were either commissioned by the Spanish court or purchased by Spanish ambassadors. Treasures of the Prado is a testament to their fine taste and vision.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When it opened on November 19, 1819, the Prado Museum, in Madrid, consisted entirely of works from the Spanish royal collections. Numerous treasures have been added since opening day, but the unique strengths of the Prado's collection can still be traced to that original core of remarkable works-many acquired or commissioned from the artists themselves during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

The Prado is internationally renowned for its unsurpassed collection of masterpieces by Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, and Peter Paul Rubens. As this richly illustrated little volume makes clear, it also possesses a brilliant collection of paintings and drawings by other artists throughout Europe as well as fascinating decorative arts and notable sculptures.

Other Details: 250 full-color illustrations 312 pages 4 x 4" Published 1998

the royal family constitute a grand finale for the royal collections in the years just before they were opened to the public.

The idea of exhibiting the collections was first broached in 1775 by Anton Raphael Mengs, a painter, theorist, and guiding spirit of the Academy; that same year plans for a museum building were submitted by the great Neoclassical architect Juan de Villanueva. Construction of the building, which was intended to house both works of art and works of science (Villanueva also designed the Astronomical Observatory and the Botanical Gardens), continued desultorily over several decades, interrupted first by the death of Charles III toward the end of 1788 and then by the Napoleonic wars.

In 1809 Joseph Bonaparte, king of Spain from 1808 to 1814 during the Napoleonic usurpation, decided to establish a museum of paintings comprising works from the royal collections and those confiscated from the religious orders, which had recently been suppressed. This museum, which came to be known as the Museo Josefino, was to have been installed in the Buenavista Palace, but its progress was halted by the fall of the Napoleonic empire. There is a certain irony in the fact that the first attempt at opening a national museum was given impetus by a Napoleonic king and that it coincided with the Napoleonic wars, which led to the disappearance of so many important works from Spanish soil.

After the fall of Joseph Bonaparte and the restoration of the Bourbons, Ferdinand VII (1814-33) renewed the museum project, but the convents' demands for the return of their paintings curtailed his plans considerably. With the support of his queen, Isabella of Braganza, he decided to place works from the royal collections on public display, and charged his majordomo, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, with the task of organizing this gallery; Santa Cruz in turn was aided by Vicente Lopez, First Painter to the Chamber. On March 3, 1818, the king ordered the restoration of Villanueva's superb Neoclassical building, begun in 1775, which had become the Museum of Natural History. Its construction had been well advanced by the time of Joseph Bonaparte's rule, but it had been heavily damaged during the wars and at one point had even been used to house French troops.

Ferdinand VII, who underwrote the repairs with his own personal funds, wanted the museum to be the setting for "the most beautiful paintings decorating his palaces." So it became. When it opened in November 1819 the museum already boasted more than fifteen hundred works, but the unusually uncrowded style of installation and the lack of display space meant that only a small portion of them could be shown. All were catalogued gradually, one room at a time, by the curator, Luis Eusebi. Though still owned by the crown and thus part of the king's estate at his death in 1833, the works in the Prado were not divided between his two daughters—a decision crucial to the museum's future. They went instead to Isabella II (1833-68), who compensated her sister for them. Throughout these years the Prado was continually enriched by the addition of works from the royal palaces, especially the Escorial, and of those purchased by successive rulers. In 1839 the Dauphin's Treasure entered the museum; a little later came drawings from the studios of the court painters. The Prado's collection of drawings now contains almost five thousand works, including those from the court painters and from the substantial bequest made by Pedro Fernández Durán in 1930. Most are Spanish and Italian.

In 1843 the first catalog of the collection, by Pedro de Madrazo, was published, incorporating 1,833 entries; the 1858 edition contained 2,001. The fall and exile of Isabella II in 1868 led to the dissolution of royal property rights and the reversion of all royal goods to the state. At that point the royal collection, still the core of today's Prado Museum, consisted of more than three thousand paintings.

In 1870 another collection entered the Prado, that of the National Museum of Painting and Sculpture (commonly known as the Trinity Museum, after the Convent of the Trinity in Madrid, where it was housed). The museum had been founded in 1836 to display works that had been seized from convents and monasteries in Madrid, Toledo, Avila, and Segovia under the Disentailment Decree, which had suppressed the religious orders and demanded the confiscation of church goods. There were 1,733 items in all, most of them from the seventeenth century.

The third core of the museum's collection consists of acquisitions made since 1856 through purchases, bequests, gifts, offerings in lieu of taxes, and so on. In 1915 Pablo Bosch donated eighty-nine paintings, including several precious works by the Spanish Primitives (from the Gothic period); the Fernández Durán bequest of 1930 encompassed more than three thousand drawings, paintings, and objets d'art. Seeking to fill a serious gap in the collections, Francisco Cambo gave the Prado several Italian Renaissance treasures, including Sandro Botticelli's Story of Nastagio degli Onesti. Recently, funds from the Villaescusa Ferrero estate have made possible the purchase of two works by famous painters previously unrepresented in the museum: the Hurdy-Gurdy Player with a Ribbon, by Georges de La Tour, and a still life by Juan Sánchez Cotán. These are only a few of the many donations.

From 1856 on, prize-winning works from the National Fine Arts Exhibitions constituted a significant proportion of the Prado's acquisitions. They were often placed in government offices or newly established provincial museums, as were many other canvases from the Prado. That lending practice, which was poorly implemented, ended a few years ago and has led to a reevaluation of the collections.

The entire collection of works from the National Fine Arts Exhibitions left the Prado in 1894, upon creation of the Museum of Modern Art; they returned in 1971, after the Cason del Buen Retiro was designated to house works by nineteenth-century Spanish masters. The Cason del Buen Retiro, located just a five-minute walk from the Prado, was formerly the ballroom of the Buen Retiro Palace, used for the entertainment of Philip IV and his court. This, along with the wing containing the Hall of Realms (now the Army Museum), is all that remains of the original structure, which was seriously damaged during the Napoleonic wars. It was transformed in the nineteenth century to house the Senate and features a splendid ceiling fresco representing The Order of the Golden Fleece, painted by Luca Giordano during his Spanish sojourn at the end of the seventeenth century. From 1981 to 1992 Picasso's celebrated Guernica, painted for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World's Fair, was displayed here. Today this work hangs in the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the newly established national museum of contemporary art in Madrid.

The Prado suffered through perilous and heroic times during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Because the museum had attained considerable symbolic and political significance, its most important works (361 paintings, 184 drawings, and the Dauphin's Treasure) were removed shortly after the first bombs fell on Madrid in November 1936. They followed the republican government in its peregrinations-first to Valencia, then to Catalonia, Perlada, and Figueras.

When the fall of Catalonia was imminent, in February 1939, an agreement was reached between the republican government and an international committee led by the painter Jose Maria Sert. The Prado's art works, along with others from various Spanish institutions, were transported by truck across the Pyrenees, then given a temporary home in Geneva, in the Palace of the League of Nations. Some of these treasures were exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva during the summer of 1939, after peace was restored in Spain; the display of so many masterpieces riveted all who saw them. The exhibition closed on August 31, and the works were traveling through France on September 3, just as World War II exploded.

Over the last twelve years the Prado has been conducting an important campaign of renovation, which includes the installation of air conditioning and improved lighting. The implementation of expansion plans—restoring the Army Museum and the Formento Palace, as well as the Botanical Gardens—will well serve the interests of the Prado's two million annual visitors by placing more of the museum's sublime collection on display.

Author Biography: Felipe Vicente Garín Llombart is the former director of the Prado Museum.