The Prado Museum

Rating:
Summary: Fine prints from a great museum
Review: This book contains fine prints of great art from a wonderful museum. It will be valued by persons who like great art, or by people who have visited the Prado and want a momento that they can page through to jog their memory of what they saw there. Some of the prints will be new to them: the Prado's collection is so vast that only a small portion of it can be displayed at a time.
Obviously, the compilers necessarily had to be selective about what they put in the book. I liked the selection of paintings by Goya but was mildly disappointed that it did not include "Saturn". Also, the compilers have made a decision to broadly cover the artists represented at the Prado, rather than making an exhaustive compilation of some of the artists that a Prado visitor might particularly have focused on, such as El Greco, Velazquez or Goya.
This is basically a book of prints, so the accompanying text is not, to my mind, a major contribution to the value of the book. The text covers the history of the museum and how the collection came into being. It briefly discusses the different "schools" of art represented in the museum: "Spanish School", "Italian School", "German School", etc. The part of the text dedicated to Velazquez is only a page and a half long (although they are big pages). For somebody without a background in art history who wants to prepare to make their Prado visit more meaningful, I will say that I benefited from reading Tomlinson's "Fransisco Goya y Lucientes: 1746-1828" and Brown's "Velazquez".