LegendThe king's brush
When Velázquez was made a knight, the king himself took a brush and painted the red cross on the painter's chest in Las Meninas.
Source: Antonio Palomino, 1724, who says only that some believe it
The story
The long building was begun in 1785 as a museum of natural history. Napoleon's cavalry used it as a barracks and stripped the lead from its roof. When the French had gone, the king's young wife, María Isabel of Braganza, persuaded him to repair it and hang his pictures in it. She died a year before it opened.
It opened on 19 November 1819 with 311 paintings, all Spanish. In China this is the twenty-fourth year of Jiaqing of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). The pictures themselves run from the 1100s to about 1900.
Close by, with a page of its own: Royal Palace, Madrid, The Louvre, Musée d'Orsay.
What is here
One ticket covers the whole museum. The free hours cover the permanent rooms only.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| Ground floor: early Flemish, Bosch, Goya's black paintings, the two days in May | Museum ticket |
| First floor: Velázquez, Titian, Rubens, El Greco, Goya's portraits | Museum ticket |
| Second floor: Goya's tapestry designs | Museum ticket |
| The building and the statues outside | Free |
If you have one minute
In front of Las Meninas, room 12
The painting is three metres high. A little princess of five stands in the middle with her maids, two dwarfs and a dog. On the left a painter looks out from behind a huge canvas. That is Velázquez. He is looking at you.
Now find the mirror on the back wall. Two small figures are reflected in it: the king and the queen. So they are standing where you stand, and the picture shows what they see. Or the mirror shows what is on the painter's canvas. Nobody has settled which.
Go close. The princess's dress, the red jug, the hand of the painter are made of a few loose strokes that mean nothing at arm's length. Step back four metres and they are silk, clay and flesh.
Look at the red cross on the painter's chest. It is the badge of a knightly order that he was given three years after he finished the picture. Someone added it later.
Things people often get wrong
"It is the Spanish Louvre: a bit of everything." It is the opposite. It has almost no Dutch pictures, because Holland was the enemy, and few English or French. What it has, it has in depth: about fifty paintings by Velázquez and more than a hundred by Goya.
"Guernica is here." Picasso's Guernica hung in an annexe of the Prado from 1981 to 1992. It is now in the Reina Sofía museum, ten minutes' walk south.
"You can photograph the pictures." You cannot. No photographs are allowed in the rooms at all.
"The Mona Lisa is in Paris only." A second one hangs here. It was painted in Leonardo's workshop, beside the original, by a pupil. Its black background was cleaned off in 2012 and a landscape appeared.
People who stood here
- Diego Velázquez (court painter to Philip IV, 1599–1660)He never saw this building, but he made the collection. He lived in the palace for thirty-seven years, twice went to Italy to buy pictures for the king, and hung them. His bronze sits at the main door.
- Francisco de Goya (court painter, 1746–1828)He was seventy-three and living in Madrid when the museum opened, and three of his pictures hung in it on the first day. That year he bought a house outside the city, and soon began to paint its walls black.
- Édouard Manet (French painter, 1832–1883)He came for ten days in 1865, hated the food, and wrote home that Velázquez was "the painter of painters" and worth the journey by himself.
- Pablo Picasso (Spanish painter, 1881–1973)His father brought him here in 1895, aged thirteen, and he copied Velázquez. In 1936 the Republic named him director of the museum. He never came back to take the post. In 1957 he painted fifty-eight versions of Las Meninas in four months.
- Timoteo Pérez Rubio (painter, 1896–1977)In November 1936 bombs fell on the museum. He led the committee that crated the best pictures and moved them by lorry, at night, to Valencia, then Catalonia, then over the border to Geneva. All of them came back in 1939. He never did: he died in exile in Brazil.
- Rafael Alberti (Spanish poet, 1902–1999)He helped send Las Meninas out of the city in 1936, lashed upright on a lorry. Twenty years later, in exile, he wrote a play in which the figures in the paintings come down from the walls to defend the museum.
- John Singer Sargent (American painter, 1856–1925)In 1879 he signed the copyists' register and copied Las Meninas and other works by Velázquez. The big empty spaces in his own portraits come from here.
Go deeper: nine pictures in the order to see them
Room numbers are those of 2026 and can change. Take the free plan at the door.
1. A cross that is also a crossbow
Start with the oldest of the great pictures: the Descent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden, painted in Flanders about 1435. Ten figures are packed into a gold box no deeper than a shelf. Look at the tears: each one has a highlight.
The body of Christ and the body of his fainting mother make the same curve. The curve is the shape of a crossbow. The men who paid for the picture were the crossbowmen's guild of their town, and there are tiny crossbows in the corners.
2. The garden
Hieronymus Bosch painted this about 1500. Read it left to right: God brings Eve to Adam; then a world of naked people riding birds, eating giant strawberries, living inside shells; then night, fire, and a man with a body like a broken egg who looks back at you.
Philip II, the most severe king Spain ever had, bought it and kept it where he could see it. On the buttocks of one sinner in hell is a line of written music. In 2014 a student wrote it out and played it.
3. An emperor on a horse
Titian painted Charles V in 1548, the year after his victory over the German Protestants. The emperor was ill with gout that day and had been carried to the field in a litter. Titian put him on a black horse at sunset, alone. The armour he wears still exists. It is in the Royal Palace, across the city.
4. The victor who will not let the loser kneel
Velázquez painted the surrender of a Dutch town to Spain. The Dutch commander bends to hand over the key. The Spanish general has got off his horse and puts a hand on his shoulder to stop him going lower. On the right stand the Spanish lances, upright. On the left the Dutch pikes lean every way.
Y por ti el gran Velázquez ha podido, diestro cuanto ingenioso, ansí animar lo hermoso, ansí dar a lo mórbido sentido con las manchas distantes
And through you the great Velázquez has been able, as skilful as he is inventive, so to give life to beauty, so to give feeling to soft flesh with blots set far apart
Francisco de Quevedo, "Al pincel" (To the Paintbrush), about 1629; the first description of how Velázquez painted, by a poet he had painted; our translation
5. Las Meninas
You have seen the great picture. In the same room look for a smaller one of women spinning wool. The wheel is spinning so fast that Velázquez left out the spokes. It is one of the first times anyone painted a blur.
The same shot: you may not photograph, so stand in the right place. For Las Meninas it is about four metres back and a step to the left of centre, in line with the mirror. That is where the king and queen are standing.
6. A family that paid to look like this
On the same floor, Goya's royal family of 1800 stand in a row in their jewels. He painted every wart and every vacant look, and they were pleased. He put himself in the shadow on the left, at an easel, as Velázquez had done.
Near it hang two pictures of the same woman on the same couch, once dressed and once naked. In 1815 the Inquisition summoned Goya to explain who had ordered them. His answer is lost.
7. Two days in May
On 2 May 1808 the people of Madrid attacked Napoleon's cavalry with knives in the middle of the city. That night and the next morning the French shot their prisoners.
Goya painted both scenes six years later. In the second, the soldiers have no faces. The man about to die has a face, a white shirt, and his arms thrown up like Christ's. A square lantern on the ground gives the only light. Almost every picture of a firing squad made since is a copy of this.
8. The black room
Downstairs is a room of fourteen pictures that Goya painted straight on to the plaster of his own dining room and sitting room when he was old, deaf and alone. He gave them no titles and showed them to nobody. They were cut from the walls almost fifty years after his death.
Saturn eating his son hung in the room where Goya ate. The dog is only a head, at the bottom of an empty slope, looking up. Nobody knows at what.
9. On the way out
Three more, if you have the legs. Dürer at twenty-six, in 1498, painted himself as a gentleman in gloves: the first time an artist north of the Alps said he was not a craftsman.
Rubens painted the Three Graces for himself and kept it till he died. The one on the left has the face of his young second wife.
And El Greco's gentleman with his hand on his chest, about 1580: a Greek painter's picture of what a Spaniard thought a Spaniard should be.