The Museo del Prado in Madrid is Spain’s national gallery and one of the greatest painting museums on earth. It is the home of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Francisco Goya’s most powerful masterpieces.
Many scholars consider this the better of the two paintings. Goya made it several years after the nude, and it shows in every stroke — the paint is laid on faster, broader, with far more freedom. The nude is smooth and worked up; the clothed maja is painted with bravura. If you only look at…
Direct eye contact was not the scandal here. Titian’s Venus of Urbino had done that 250 years earlier, and Goya knew it. The break was something else: this is the first known painting in Western art to show a woman’s pubic hair, with no mythological cover and no gesture of modesty. For the Inquisition that…
A significant part of what you see on this canvas was not painted by Goya. During the evacuation of the Prado’s collection in the Spanish Civil War, the picture was badly damaged — far worse than its companion, The Third of May. Large areas had to be reconstructed after the war. It is one reason…
For the first forty years, nobody saw this painting. Commissioned in 1814, it went into storage and the first firm record of it hanging in the Prado dates from 1872. The reason was simple: Ferdinand VII, who paid for it, was building his legitimacy on the return of a rightful monarch — not on a…
This is not quite what Goya painted. Before the mural was transferred from wall to canvas in 1874, the photographer Jean Laurent recorded it — and the photograph shows something else. The image was wider, and elements on the right no longer exist. The restorer removed them during the transfer. What hangs in the Prado…
Most paintings hang quietly on museum walls – but The Garden of Earthly Delights has been sparking arguments, inspiring nightmares, and baffling scholars for over five hundred years. It also contains a scrap of musical notation inked across a damned soul’s buttocks, which a student transcribed in 2014 and turned into an internet phenomenon. Quick…
Most visitors who stand before Las Meninas for the first time experience a quietly unsettling feeling – as if they have just walked into a room uninvited, and everyone in it already knew they were coming. Quick Facts Artist: Diego Velázquez Year: 1656 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 318 cm × 276 cm (125.2 in…