Museo del Prado

The building was conceived by José Moñino y Redondo, count of Floridablanca, first secretary of state to Charles III, as a Royal Cabinet of Natural History, one of the scientific institutions planned for the reurbanisation of the Salón del Prado. Charles III commissioned it in 1785 from Juan de Villanueva, architect also of the neighbouring Royal Botanical Garden and Royal Astronomical Observatory, the three known together as the Hill of Sciences.

Work went on through the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV, and the building was substantially finished by the start of the nineteenth century. The Peninsular War then turned the premises to military use, as a cavalry barracks and a gunpowder store for the Napoleonic troops in Madrid, with the lead sheeting of the roofs melted down for bullets. The shell fell close to ruin.

Recovery began in 1818 on the interest of Ferdinand VII and, above all, of his second wife Queen María Isabel de Braganza, and by then the intended purpose had changed to an art museum. Rebuilding followed new designs by Villanueva, and after his death by his pupil Antonio López Aguado, paid for out of the king's private purse. The Museo Real de Pinturas opened quietly on 19 November 1819 with 311 paintings hung in three rooms, all of the Spanish school, while the museum held 1,510 works from the royal residences, most of them unhung. It was founded both to show the art of the Crown and to demonstrate to the rest of Europe that Spanish painting was the equal of any other school.

Isabella II was deposed in 1868, and the law of 18 December 1869 abolished the patrimony of the Crown. In 1872 the Museo de la Trinidad, formed from art requisitioned under Mendizábal's disentailment law of 1836, was suppressed and its holdings passed to the Prado. A royal decree of 14 May 1920 made official the name already in everyday use, Museo Nacional del Prado, after the Prado de los Jerónimos on whose ground the building stood.

State support was thin: staff lived in the building and firewood was stacked for the stoves. In 1891 Mariano de Cavia gave the front page of El Liberal to an account of a fire that had destroyed the Prado, revealing only in his closing lines that he had invented it; alarmed Madrileños hurried to the site, and urgent improvements followed. In 1918 a museum employee, Rafael Coba, plundered the Dauphin's Treasure; most pieces were recovered, eleven were not, and thirty-five came back stripped of many of their settings of precious stones and metals. It cost the director, the painter José Villegas Cordero, his post, and closed the studios artists had kept in the gallery.

During the Civil War, on the recommendation of the League of Nations, the staff removed 353 paintings, 168 drawings and the Dauphin's Treasure from Madrid, in fear that bombing by the Francoist side would destroy the building and its contents. They went to Valencia, then Girona, and by train to Geneva, where the Museum of Art and History showed them in 1939 to some 400,000 visitors, Paul Klee and Alberto Giacometti among those who came. On the outbreak of the Second World War the works were carried back across French territory in night trains, after an absence of nearly three years.

Manuel Villaescusa left the Prado his fortune of nearly $40 million in Madrid real estate in 1991, to be used solely for the acquisition of paintings; the bequest made the museum one of the most formidable bidders for paintings in the world. The patched roof was rebuilt between 1996 and 2001 to a design by Dionisio Hernández Gil and Rafael Olalquiaga. Under bylaws approved by the Cortes in 2003 the Prado was to reduce state support from 80 to 50 per cent in exchange for control of its own budget, though the Spanish state paid for its €150 million expansion of 2004. Rafael Moneo's underground extension opened in October 2007, taking exhibition space to 16,000 square metres.

The Salón de Reinos, the army museum until 2005, was acquired by the Prado in 2015, and in November 2016 Norman Foster and Carlos Rubio Carvajal were chosen to convert it; the government approved the plans and awarded €36 million in 2021. The building has been listed as a bien de interés cultural since March 1962, and the Paseo del Prado it shares with the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofía was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2021. The museum is governed under the law of 25 November 2003 by a director, Miguel Falomir, in post since 2017, assisted by the Royal Board of Trustees.