Organized by the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, the exhibition aims to illustrate a very fruitful but largely unknown chapter of European Renaissance culture: the short period of about thirty years, roughly from 1504 to 1535, during which we witness the transition from Southern Spain and Italy to what Vasari called "the modern manner", the great art based on the revolution carried out by Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. The novelties elaborated in the pontifical capital were immediately received and reinterpreted in Naples, which in those years became Spanish (1504). Here, the great artists of the first generation of the Iberian Renaissance –Pedro Fernández, Bartolomé Ordóñez, Diego de Siloe, Pedro Machuca, and perhaps also Alonso Berruguete– were able to take their first solid professional steps, creating some works of great importance.

How can we appreciate the work of the great masters without being mere passive receptors of their appeal? How do we submerge ourselves in the art of the past without renouncing our commitment to the modern and contemporary avant-gardes? The answer according to Fernando Zóbel (Manila, 1924-Rome, 1984) was both simple and enormously sophisticated: study them in order to understand them and then reinvent them.

Forty-two paintings, fifty-one sketchbooks and eighty-five drawings and graphic works loaned from collections in Spain, the Philippines and the USA make up this survey through which the Museo Nacional del Prado, with the collaboration of the Comunidad de Madrid, pays tribute to Fernando Zóbel, a key figure in Spanish painting of the second half of the 20th century. Born into a Spanish family in Manila, Zóbel focused intensively on the paintings in the Prado and was the founder of the Museo de Arte Abstracto in Cuenca. He was an artist who saw his painting as an instrument with which he could navigate the complex routes traced by the history of art in order to both admire and understand them.

Curated by Joan Molina, Head of the Department of Spanish Gothic Painting at the Museo Nacional del Prado, and in collaboration with the Biblioteca Nacional de España, this exhibition outlines, for the first time, a joint presentation of a group of paintings and manuscripts commissioned by the Marqués de Santillana complemented with other works by Jorge Inglés –his favorite painter– and a series of codices owned by some contemporary figures who shared the hobbies of the Castilian nobleman. It is possible to approach it thanks to the presence of the Altarpiece of Los Gozos in the Prado, a deposit of the XIX Duke of the Infantado, Íñigo de Arteaga y Martín.

Prado extendido aims to point out The Museo del Prado’s collection on a national level through an innovative management long-term loans plan which fosters the collection’s standing, visibility and accessibility in the Spanish territory in order to encourage its knowledge and dissemination.

The idea will be developed in collaboration with more than 270 institutions that house objects on long-term loan from The Museo del Prado’s collection, and seeks to strengthen the relationships with other museums in order to complete their exhibition discourses, the definition of their museological identities and training the staff who work for them in museological matters.