h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I saw at BBC-World today, that there is a large exposition of Spanish
portraits made in the period of the last five hundred years in the famous Prado Museum in Madrid.


Theme course; "The Spanish portrait from El Greco to Picasso"
october 2005 - January 2005.


See; http://museoprado.mcu.es/ihome.html

Quote;

"In spite of the importance of portraits in Spanish painting, and of the fact that the great portraitists have been widely studied by specialists, this is the first time that the genre will be shown from a broad and ambitious perspective, spanning the Modern and Contemporary periods.

The fact that it is organised by the Prado Museum makes it possible to include some fundamental pieces (such as the royal families painted by Velázquez and Goya) which would have been absent anywhere else.

The works have been selected with the aim of showing the high standards of quality that this genre achieved in Spain throughout the centuries, the way this "tradition" - from which successive artists have drawn - has developed, the originality with which great artists have reacted to their predecessors, and the process of including new social classes in it.

Although the contributions by El Greco, Velázquez, Goya and Picasso are greater than those by other artists, as befits the quality and originality with which their tackled the genre, we have tried to include a representative sample of the other great Spanish portraitists, as well as the most important typologies. All this through a discourse mainly chronological in nature, yet which bears in mind the possibility of "confronting" artists from different periods.
Thus, in different places we will see paintings by El Greco next to others by Velázquez, or those of the latter next to paintings by Goya. We have also tried to stress the importance of foreign contributions to the history of this genre. We have achieved this by including works by Juan de Flandes, Titian, Pieter Kempener, Anthonis Mor Van Dashorst and Anton Raphael Mengs, for we must never forget that Spanish art is also European art".



Greetings from Amsterdam