Voces del Prado

Eternity

Miguel Zugaza Miranda, Museum Director, 2002-2017

There are still a lot of things to be done in my opinion. The Prado has a brilliant future. I can imagine marvellous things in that future, so of course there are still things outstanding as this is an endless process.
There’s something marvellous about it. As Ramón Gaya said, it’s the rock of Spain, something inaccessible and impregnable. You try and conquer it but you can never totally grasp it. That’s what makes it eternal. It makes it so important that even in the modern world, where we’re so bored with images and with that overwhelming excess of visual communication, we still feel like visiting a museum like the Prado, coming close to images that are so old, and if that’s the case it’s because we still need to. They speak to us, and I think that’s marvellous in the Prado: that sensation of it never being exhausted, of it always transforming itself into something new, is marvellous in art but it takes shape in a clear form in the Museo del Prado.