TREASURES OF THE PRADO

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.