The Prado Museum is more than its exceptional collections: thousands of individual stories and collective constitute the rich history of this institution, which celebrated its bicentennial in 2019. As a closing to the acts of the anniversary the museum has been proposed to have now his own biography in three halls and with 900,000 euros of the budget. Remodeling to accommodate the new exhibition space is already underway, but will not be finalized until the end of this year.
The Prado has decided to go magazine to “the numerous political vicissitudes, architectural and museological who have been transformed into the public institution of international relevance that it is today,” impinging from the direction of the center. As explained by Andrés Úbeda, deputy director of the Prado, “we are betting very strong for this project because we want the public to know the history of your museum.” The Prado is not only the depository of a unique collection of art, “is an institution with a history of its own and we want to make it known,” he says.
The rooms that are being prepared for this purpose are located in the basement, in space where before was the Treasure of the Dolphin. The new unit is expository to stably stop in the history of the museum, its buildings, its workers and their samples, and will include items such as a cap elevator operator, the escupideras of Talavera pottery, the chair for the vigilant, ancient medallions, the studs of entries, one of the incendiary bombs launched by the pro-franco army on the museum, or that cupboard in which to Enrique Quintana,the head of the restoration workshop, has been saving all the instruments of their craft that the previous restorers used to preserve the works. The tour will be structured in eight chapters, documented with paintings, sculptures, engravings, photographs, objects, models, or drawings, taken out of the archive and the museum library.
The objectives of the new project, according to the management, are: “to Reflect on the evolution of the Prado, to define the main stages that marked its physical configuration and museological, to emphasize the singular landmarks that marked advances in the fields of architecture, museography, the profession curatorial and public service and to fit the history of the museum in the current reality of the institution”.
According to the deputy director, the rooms remodeled and will become the new start of the tour the visit to the museum. With plenty of documentation and four models new, there will be a particular emphasis on the aspect of museums, how it has been changing the way of presenting the works in the rooms and in the discourse around the art resulting from these trips. There will also be a space reserved for people who have been part of the Prado (from guardians and conservators to directors and kings). There shall not fail nor did the memory of the Civil War in the new historical overview, which starts with a portrait of Bernardo Lopez of the queen María Isabel de Braganza, who interceded in a decisive way to the creation of the Royal Museum of Paintings that would become the Prado.
there Will be more glass boxes, more paper than paintings. That’s why, even if it is a permanent exhibition of documents and works (photographs, brochures, newspaper articles, engravings, etc) will be in constant rotation to avoid damage, and will be protected by a lighting without ultraviolet radiation and infrared. “These rooms will be a new experience, because there will be only one of the best art collections in the world, but that the field itself becomes aware of its own history: that of a museum for everyone”, explains Úbeda.
