The Museo del Prado is celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Miguel Blay (Olot, 1866 – Madrid, 1936), one of the most important Spanish sculptors of the late 19^th and first third of the 20^th centuries, with an exhibition of several important works from a career that reflects the different trends prevailing in sculpture during his lifetime, principally Realism, Modernismo and Symbolism.

The Museo del Prado is presenting Infinite Garden, a specially created installation made possible through the sole sponsorship of Fundación BBVA. Taking its starting point from Bosch’s masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights, it has been specifically designed for Room C of the Museum.

Infinite Garden comprises a multi-projection on 18 video channels of a video and audio work lasting 75 minutes and accompanied by 16 soundtracks. The installation’s creators have reinterpreted and reconstructed images from The Garden of Earthly Delights in order to offer a completely new work.

Clara Peeters was a pioneer in the field of still life painting, and one of the few women painters active in Early Modern Europe. She worked in Antwerp, and her first dated painting is from 1607. Approximately forty paintings by her are known today.

The paintings of Clara Peeters are elegant and precise. They are also enigmatic. What did a porcelain vessel of the type that we see in these still lifes mean to someone around 1610? And an artichoke or a sea shell? The goal of this exhibition is to answer these questions, and to highlight the achievements of this little known but extraordinary artist.

The Museo del Prado is inviting visitors to reflect on the changing status of painting and the other arts with an exhibition largely although not entirely based on works associated with the royal collections and with Spanish art. A selection of more than 100 paintings, prints and sculptures dating from the start of the modern age to the late 19th century will allow for an overview of the principal ideas on images, art, artists and the public over the course of the centuries.

Structured into different sections, the exhibition will analyse issues such as the origins of artistic activity; religious and mythological accounts; the “magical” nature of images and their devotional function; the emergence of the idea of “art”; the relationship between pictorial and real space; the way in which artists have represented themselves or have reflected on their creative and working environment; and the fundamental concerns of art theory.

To coincide with the publication of the new catalogue raisónne of drawings by Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), co-published with Fundación Focus-Abengoa and the Meadows Museum in Dallas, the Museo del Prado in collaboration with the Meadows Museum is organising an exhibition on Ribera’s drawings to be shown at the two institutions.

Born in Valencia, Ribera was active for most of his career in Naples where he had a significant influence on the development of art in the 17th century. Despite being described as a Caravaggesque painter, in contrast to the apparent lack of drawings by Caravaggio, Ribera produced a notable corpus of graphic art and was very interested in the use of drawing as a fundamental part of an artist’s training. This exhibition aims to emphasise the variety of the artist’s drawings, his technical skill in the use of pen, ink and brush, and the originality of his subject matter: anatomical and figure studies, scenes of everyday life and episodes of torture and martyrdom.