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.

This homage to Sorolla reunites in Room 60 at the Villanueva building, usually focused on 19th Century Collections, a selection of the artist’s portraits kept by the museum. The exhibition is completed with some artworks that are part of the Permanent Collection in Room 60A, next to the previous one, and 62A, where you can find portraits by artists from the 19th century, four by Sorolla among them. One of them, Martin Rico’s portrait, was acquired in 2022 and was placed in that room just a few months ago.

This set of portraits offers a complete and comprehensive vision of Sorolla's evolution as a portraitist, which would give him international recognition at the beginning of the 20th century.

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.

La apertura en 2022 de la Galería Jónica norte de Escultura en el Museo del Prado se convierte en un sugestivo pretexto para reflexionar sobre la procedencia de varias de las más importantes colecciones escultóricas que se integraron en la colección real, y que conforman una parte de las colecciones de escultura del Museo del Prado.

In collaboration with the Ministry of Culture’s Institute for Women, until 9 April 2023 the Museo Nacional del Prado is offering a new perspective on its permanent collection through a thematic route devised with the academic supervision of Noelia García Pérez, associate professor of art history at the University of Murcia. The result is a fresh viewpoint and one that encourages us to focus on the role of women as promoters and patrons of the arts.

The works included in this thematic route are associated with women who were not only notable for their activities as patrons but also in the promotion of the artists who worked in their service. One particularly notable example is that of Isabel Clara Eugenia. The Prado houses dozens of works directly resulting from her patronage, in addition to the fact that the Museum’s close connections with Rubens is particularly allied to the promotion and dissemination of his career on the part of the Archduchess, who was governor of the Southern Netherlands. This explains why the Prado houses the largest collection of works by Rubens in the world.