Museo del Prado: Velázquez at the Door

Why is it significant?

Face the long colonnaded front of the Prado, and say hello to the seated bronze gentleman with a moustache, a brush and a palette. That is Diego Velázquez, painter to Philip the Fourth, and he is sitting outside the building that holds the largest collection of his work in the world.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Face the long colonnaded front of the Prado, and say hello to the seated bronze gentleman with a moustache, a brush and a palette. That is Diego Velázquez, painter to Philip the Fourth, and he is sitting outside the building that holds the largest collection of his work in the world.

The Prado opened on the 19th of November 1819 as the Royal Museum of Paintings, with a little over three hundred pictures on show. Behind it lies something no other museum quite has: the taste of Spanish kings, collected over three centuries. Charles the Fifth loved Titian, Philip the Second collected Bosch, including The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Philip the Fourth bought Rubens by the wagonload. Nobody assembled this collection for the public. It was the private wall decoration of an empire.

Inside hangs Las Meninas, painted in 1656. The little princess Margarita stands in the light with her maids, a dwarf, a sleepy dog, and Velázquez himself at a huge canvas, looking straight out at you. In a mirror at the back, the king and queen appear, as if they were standing exactly where you stand. And on the painter's chest is the red cross of the Order of Santiago... which he only received in 1659, three years after finishing the picture. Legend says Philip the Fourth painted it on himself, after Velázquez died. Nobody can prove it, and nobody wants to stop telling it.

Walk around to the north end and you will meet a second statue, Francisco de Goya. Inside, in rooms of their own, hang his Black Paintings, painted around 1820 directly onto the plaster walls of his country house outside Madrid, when he was old, deaf and disillusioned. Saturn devouring his son. Two men clubbing each other, sunk to their knees in mud. Decades later the walls were peeled off, transferred to canvas, and given to the museum.

When you are done, walk round to the back of the museum, up the slope behind it. There, a royal church with two pointed towers stands beside a modern cube of brick, and between them hides a cloister that was taken apart stone by stone.