Spanish Museums

If it's art that you're after then Spain's many galleries cannot fail to satisfy. But as the Oxford History of Western Art suggests, in some cases the real attractions may prove to be the spectacular buildings that house the collections:

The Bilbao Guggenheim museum (1994-7), designed by Frank Gehry, is in the Basque capital of northern Spain. Bilbao uses a system of sand-blasted stainless steel panels based on the teetering organic shapes of the fantastic architecture first sketched by Vladimir Krinskii, Boris Korolev, and others (but never built) after the Russian Revolution in 1917. In this respect it is ironical that Bilbao houses a collection of predominantly American art - with Spanish and Basque modernism seen lying outside the post-war canon. By the time of its completion in 1997, the experience of the gallery was one of spatial complexity perhaps unequalled in any other building type, and rivalling if not exceeding that of the works of art themselves.

However, according to The Oxford Dictionary of Art, the outstanding collection of Spanish painting at Madrid's Prado museum keeps the spotlight firmly on art rather than architecture.

The Prado is Spain's national museum of art, founded in 1818 by Ferdinand VII (1784-1833) and opened to the public in 1819. The building, one of the finest examples of Spanish Neoclassical architecture, had been intended for a Museum of Natural Science but had never served that purpose. The major part of the collection derives from the royal collections made in the course of three centuries by the Habsburg and Bourbon kings of Spain, who were some of the most discriminating and lavish patrons of Europe. The museum is remarkable less for its all-round comprehensiveness than for unequalled representation in certain fields. Above all, it contains what is far and away the world's greatest collection of Spanish painting, the three giants, El Greco, Velázquez, and Goya, being supremely well represented. It is among the richest of all museums in works by Hieronymous Bosch, Titian, and Patenier. It also has superb collections of Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens, and van Dyck, and splendid examples of the Master of Flémalle, Rogier van der Weyden, Breugel, Raphael, and Mantegna.

This article was adapted from the entry on Picasso in the Oxford Companion to Western Art.