The luxury of time to see ‘the best of the best’ at one of the world’s leading art museums, the Prado in Madrid, as it reopens to a small number of visitors after lockdown
- With numbers limited to 12 per cent of peak capacity, visitors to the Prado have an unparalleled opportunity to admire some of the world’s finest paintings
- Its director sees big museums making more of their permanent collections, and the Prado has assembled 200 of its best works for its first post-coronavirus show
A moment of almost-total silence contemplating Velazquez’s Las Meninas is the rare opportunity offered by Madrid’s Prado museum, which reopened its doors to a handful of visitors last weekend after a three-month closure.
In its vast central gallery that is bathed in natural daylight, Spain’s biggest museum has put together more than 200 paintings in a new exhibition called “Reunion” that will run until September 13.
Ana Garcia, one of the museum staff tasked with guarding the celebrated painting, says the reopening will offer people a unique opportunity to get up close to works of art that are often crowded out by visitors. “It’s a luxury to be able to be alone with Las Meninas,” she says of Diego Velazquez’s 17th-century canvas that depicts the young princess, Infanta Margarita, with her ladies-in-waiting (meninas) wearing tight corsets and wide hooped skirts.
The place where the painting normally hangs is “the room which is most visited by big groups”, says the 52-year-old, who is wearing a mask and a plastic visor.
With famous museums closed across the globe by the pandemic, the Prado is reopening a month ahead of the Louvre in Paris, along with the city’s two other big museums – the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen.