SPAIN:After more than a decade, the Prado's much-needed extension is finally complete, writes Jane Walkerin Madrid
It has taken more than a decade and many false starts, but this week the Prado Museum in Madrid will open a much-needed extension designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo.
According to Prado director Miguel Zugaza, the new wing "will bring the museum right into the 21st century". The original Juan de Villanueva-designed museum, dating back to 1785, outgrew its premises many years ago. Over the years, various extensions - some of them ill-advised - spread over every available metre. Only about one-fifth of the museum's priceless treasures, including works by masters such as Velázquez, Goya, Bosch and El Greco, were on show at any one time. Hundreds of others were stored in basements or loaned out to government buildings and Spanish embassies overseas.
The museum knew that drastic steps had to be taken if the Prado was to keep its place as one of the world's great museums. But the problem was, short of moving to a new purpose-built building elsewhere, how to expand. Two unsuccessful international architectural competitions ended in stalemate before the Moneo design was chosen.
Moneo faced a tough brief. The site was problematic as the museum was on the side of a hill and the plot contained the San Jerónimo Church and its adjoining cloisters.
Eventually the government reached an agreement with the Jerónimo order to purchase and restore the cloisters in exchange for building them new parochial buildings nearby.
Moneo's ingenious €152 million solution has increased the museum area by 50 per cent - almost 16,000sq m - permitting the Prado to display many of its previously hidden masterpieces. It also gives the museum much-needed new facilities for conservation, restoration and research, as well as a bookshop, cafe, restaurant, auditorium and lecture hall.
Moneo has restored and incorporated the 16th-century ruins of the cloisters (which he describes as being "of no great artistic merit") under a huge glass roof, already dubbed the "Moneo Cube". The cube becomes an atrium and makes the cloisters visible from the exterior, while giving natural light to three floors of exhibition space and two floors of offices, workshops and a library. There are two more floors underground, reached by lifts big enough to hold the museum's largest paintings.
The terrace between the new and old buildings and their two levels has been planted with formal box hedges. Leading to this terrace from the red-brick facade of the new upper building is a dramatic bronze doorway designed by sculptor Cristina Iglesias that resembles the gnarled bark of ancient trees.
Linking the old and the new buildings on the lower level is a deep red semicircular chamber known as the Chamber of the Muses. It is lined with eight classical statues which were discovered in 1500 in Hadrian's Villa and were purchased by King Philip V of Spain in 1725.
From the bronze doors of the chamber there is a view right through the museum to the neo-classical Velázquez entrance.
The benefits of the extension will be proven when it opens to the public tomorrow.
Previously, many works had to be removed from the walls to make space for temporary exhibitions. Now, with the new wing, the paintings can remain on view during such exhibitions.
To mark the inauguration of the new wing, the museum will stage a temporary exhibition of more than 100 of the Prado's 19th-century Spanish paintings, from Goya to Joaquín Sorolla.
"Few people realise that Goya was a 19th-century painter," says Prado deputy director Gabriele Finaldi."But in fact he lived for almost 30 years of the 19th century."
Goya is also the subject of a second, smaller exhibition entitled Goya; the Butterfly Bull: Flight, Amusement and Laughter, which is taking place at the same time. It celebrates the acquisition last year of the drawings Goya executed shortly before his death in exile in Bordeaux.
To celebrate the "new" Prado, the museum is embarking on a series of major exhibitions. The 19th-century show will be followed by the Prado's El Greco collection in December and Velázquez in January, while next spring a Goya festival will take place as part of the 200th anniversary of Spain's war of independence against the Napoleonic occupation.