Art Treasures of the Prado Museum [antikvár]

FOREWORD IN THE FOREWORD to W. H. Boulton's The Romance of the British Museum, Sir Frederick Kenyon wrote: "The universe of man, like the universe of nature, extends its boundaries daily before our eyes; and it is in our museums that the story is displayed for the visitor to see." The Prado unfolds the panorama of Spain's history while at the same time it presents masterpieces of a standard which is uniformly higher than any comparable collection can boast. There are on its vcalls no paintings to which the visitor can remain indifferent; he will encounter in its galleries few works of art that fail to move, delight, or instruct him. This high level of quaUty is due to the fact that the Prado Museum, at the time of its creation in 1819 and in the ensuing years, had as its nucleus the paintings from the collections formed in the course of three centuries by the Kings of Spain. One may observe that in the royal succession, a taste for painting appears to have been a hereditary characteristic. This love of painting and taste for art goes back as far as the thirteenth century. Sancho IV of Castile commissioned painters and paid them regular fees. His father Alfonso X the Wise, who died in 1284, had one of his miniaturists paint a panel showing a view of a shop where paintings were sold, as an illustration for the ninth of his Canticles of the Virgin; and in compiling his famous codex of laws, the Siete Partidas, he included a law regarding the ownership of a picture in a case where the panel on which it had been painted did not belong to the painter. No parallel examples can be found in other countries. The fondness of the Castilian court for painting continued during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. John II and Henry IV acquired Flemish panels, and Queen Isabella the Catholic collected pictures with such ardor and good taste that in a future edition of his famous and delightful book. The Taste of Angels, Mr. Francis Henry Taylor will have to devote a special chapter to her. It is easy to demonstrate the persistence of this love of painting on the part of the Spanish Kings. The Emperor Charles V was a patron of Titian's; Philip II, as a well-informed amateur rather than simply a Mycenas, bought tirelessly in Italy and Flanders; Philip III enlarged the collections still further and brought Rubens to his court for an eight-month sojourn. Philip IV recalled this great painter of Antwerp to his service for half a year and sent Velázquez—his friend as well as his painter—to Italy twice, to buy masterpieces; and at the auction held after the death of Charles I of England, he acquired works of Mantegna, Raphael, and others. Charles II summoned all the forces that his congenital weakness could command to defend the artistic patrimony of the Crown. Philip V, to counteract the decline of Spain, engaged artists in France and bought hundreds of Dutch and Flemish genre and landscape paintings. Ferdinand VI and Charles III summoned to their court the Italians Amigoni, Giaquinto, and Tiepolo, and the Bohemian painter A. R. Mengs. Charles IV, while a prince, formed an admirable personal collection and gave employ- 13