For 200 Years, a Spanish Cultural Gem
MADRID — The Prado was not designed to be one of the world’s great art galleries. But as it celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, Spain’s national museum can boast of welcoming almost three million visitors a year to what has become one of Europe’s finest painting collections.
When King Charles III of Spain commissioned the building in the 1780s, he wanted a museum of natural science to celebrate the spirit of the Enlightenment. But when his ultraconservative grandson, Ferdinand VII, came to the throne three decades later, he put a stop to that. “He wanted to showcase the wealth of his collection rather than make any kind of contribution to scientific progress,” said Javier Portús, the curator of an exhibition that celebrates the Prado’s bicentenary.
“The i rony is that the Prado opened in a period of clearly regressive thinking in Spain,” he added.
The exhibition, called “A Place of Memory” and running through March 10, shows how the Prado navigated Spanish politics, as the country went from being an imperial power to a nation divided by civil war, and then through dictatorship to the democracy it is today.
The Prado was regularly threatened by domestic turmoil in Spain, particularly during the civil war in the 1930s, when the paintings were removed from the museum and taken to Switzerland.
But through two centuries of shifting politics, the Prado kept its place as a symbol of Spain’s cultural wealth. “I think the Prado represents the best image of Spain, because it’s a place that has always somehow managed to stay above our political divisions,” said Antonio Muñoz Molina, a writer and member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
For many visitors, “it’s probably a surprise to hear the Prado is only 200 years old, because we so often think about its great collection from the 16th century,” said Taco Dibbits, the director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Among the treasures from this period are the portraits by Titian and other artists of Emperor Charles V, whose territory covered more than three million square kilometers, including much of Western Europe from Flanders, where he was born, to Western Spain, where he died. The portraits became part of the Spanish royal collection and later landed in the Prado.
Compared with some other national museums, the Prado is “really unique as the collection of an emperor who had the best from the European countries over which Spain once reigned,” Mr. Dibbits said. “It’s special in being very international, but on the other hand, in also having a very clear national identity.”
The bicentennial exhibition focuses on foreign painters who visited the Prado to discover Diego Velázquez and the other great Spanish masters. Those visitors included artists such as Édouard Manet of France and the Americans William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent.
The show also highlights some of the most innovative periods for the Prado, including during the Second Republic in the early 1930s, when the Prado played a pivotal part in an educational program to introduce citizens to culture.
In that drive, a traveling exhibition took copies of the Prado’s masterworks to 170 towns across Spain, many of them in farming regions. A 1932 photograph in “A Place of Memory” shows a crowd of rural folk viewing a copy of Velázquez’s “The Spinners.”
“Illiterate people who had never gotten out of their villages suddenly discovered Velázquez and the incredible artistic wealth of Spain,” Mr. Portús said.
While the museum has become an international tourism magnet for Madrid, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, a Spanish film director and former board member of the museum, said the institution “continues to contribute a lot to the self- esteem of Spaniards, to our nationalist pomp as a democracy and monarchy, in the best sense.”
He recalled how his perception of the Prado was shaped during his first childhood visit. “It looked to me like this wonderful set of cartoon images of our great history,” he said, “full of incredible colors that contrasted with a Spain that was then very gray.”