THE PRADO
The Prado Museum in Madrid has long been known as "the museum lover's museum" for its unsur- passed holdings of outstanding paintings by great European masters. In this lavish book are the jewels of the Prado's collection, gathered by the kings and queens of Spain and shown in all their splendor. The paintings, from all over Europe, are varied in style but uniformly marvelous quality.
The Prado opens with a complete illustrated history of the museum. The author, renowned Spanish art historian Santiago Alcolea Blanch, pays special attention to those discriminating and knowledgeable royal patrons of the arts - Queen Isabella, Charles V. Philip II, and the others - who collected Rubens and Tintoretto, Poussin and Titian; sought the friendship of Velázquez; encour- aged the young Goya; and without resorting to conquest or coercion, left us an unparalleled treasure.
Then, as if on a private guided tour of the museum's galleries, the reader is presented with 275 of the finest of the Prado's possessions. Just as in the museum itself, the paintings are grouped ac- cording to the different schools (Spanish, Italian, Flemish, German, Dutch, French, and British). The glorious colorplates appear in chronological order and are preceded by an explanatory essay about the particular collection.
All the works in this volume are acknowledged masterpieces, by the the best, and best-known, painters of twelfth through twentieth cen- the uries. From Flanders, for example, are Brueghel's Triumph of Death; the erotic crystalline vision of Bosch's Garden of Delights; and the mythical creations of Rubens's Three Graces and bold and sensous Garden of Love, among many others. Italian masterpieces includrocessi the Virgin, a include Mantegna's Death of a magnificent procession of Titians, of Moses, Raphael's Madonna Veronese's Finding of Moses, of the Fish, and Tiepolo's Olympus. The world's lustrous collection of Spanish art features the most lustrous coll finest works of El Greco, Zurbarán, Velázquez, Murillo, Goya, and Picasso. Add these to paintings by Cranach and Dürer, Watteau and Poussin, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, and dozens of other European masters, and it is easy to see why the Prado is considered one of the greatest museums in the world.

More than 300 illustrations, including 275 plates in full color