Lecture: 'The Prado: Secrets of the Madrid Court, or How a Great Museum Is Born'

The birth of a museum is always an adventurous novel. The creation of a great museum can rival an epic. Spain’s history—from the 16th century to today—is inseparably linked with the Prado Museum. The lecture’s topic will be the diverse storylines of the museum’s epic history: how the collection was formed, why it has so few Dutch and English works, what the metaphysical principle of hanging art at the Prado is (and what the museum itself, it turns out, doesn’t know), what role modern French wallpaper played in the museum’s history, as well as fires (one real and the other a hoax). We’ll also discuss how the collection was saved during the years of the Civil War, why, by the end of the 20th century, five directors had changed in just six years, and details of the museum fate of its residents—from Bosch and Fra Angelico to Velázquez and Goya. About Spain’s main museum— in a lecture by Tatyana Pigareva, a philologist and specialist in Spanish studies, head of the Culture Department at the Cervantes Institute in Moscow.