Museo del Prado, Madrid

Museo del Prado, Madrid

Neoclassical architecture, which looked not to the Renaissance for its inspiration as the preceding baroque and rococo styles had, but instead to the classical world, was Enlightenment philosophy realized as marble and glass. Like their counterparts in the Renaissance, neoclassical architects believed that applying mathematical ratios and ideal geometries when creating their work allowed them to create beauty. The difference between the two groups was that while the ideals of the Renaissance centered around mathematics as inherently beautiful and held that replication of the classical world’s techniques was a means for producing ideal art, neoclassical theory was concerned less with the physical beauty of a structure and more with its symbolic meaning. This is not to say that neoclassical buildings are ugly, but instead that their beauty and their references to classical work were intended to reflect reason, which was held by the Enlightenment-inspired neoclassicists to be the root of all knowledge and virtue. The mathematical purity, clean lines, and stark white materials characteristic of neoclassicism therefore managed to do something that not even the extravagant architects of the baroque period had managed to accomplish: for the first time since the Renaissance, European architecture began to properly shake loose the conventions of the classical world. The design of the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and specifically of its facade looking out onto the Paseo del Prado, is physical evidence for the beginning of this process.

This argument may seem a bit confusing. After all, neoclassicism was definitionally classical; leaving aside the fact that “classicism” is in the name of the movement, the style’s clear fondness for columns, white marble, “perfect” mathematical designs, and other hallmarks of classical design indicate that neoclassicism did anything but turn away from the Greco-Roman tradition. The Museo del Prado’s facade would likewise appear to back this reading of neoclassicism up: commissioned by Spain’s King Charles III and built starting in 1785 by the architect Juan de Villanueva, the museum which now houses the world’s largest collection of Spanish art was initially designed as the home for Spain’s national Natural History Cabinet, and it looks the part (Museo del Prado, History of the Museum). On the building’s facade, a portico supported by large columns projects out towards the Paseo del Prado. This portico is topped by a relief carving and set against a wall composed of statue-filled niches beneath second-floor windows that are framed on either side by the columns of an Ionic colonnade. Save the occasional use of red brick, the facade is almost entirely made of white marble, and one could be forgiven for mistaking it at first glance for some misplaced and renovated Roman basilica. Then, however, the discrepancies between the Prado’s style and that of the Romans (or the Renaissance) would start to become noticeable.

For one thing, though the columns abutting the second-story windows are Ionic, they are smoothly cylindrical rather than fluted, and the large columns supporting the portico are Tuscan, the simplest of the ancient orders. Moreover, the facade’s pediment is rectangular, not triangular. This is an earth-shattering design choice. It is difficult to explain how irregular a rectangular pediment is from a classicist perspective, except to say that it’s a bit like seeing a Spanish Colonial building whose arches are square, or an American suburban house with a flat roof. In the classical tradition, one simply does not make a pediment rectangular. It might not even be proper to call such features “pediments.” Either way, though, the Prado’s pediment is indeed rectangular, which communicates a key feature of neoclassical architecture: though neoclassicism was inspired by classicism, it was not beholden to it. Villanueva designed the Prado to house a museum, but he also wanted to create a rational building. White marble and clean lines helped to achieve that, but so would replacing the traditional silhouette-interrupting triangular pediment with a flat, rectangular one. That, therefore, is what Villanueva did. If rational design, if the ideals of the Enlightenment, seemed to require that some pieces of classical tradition be abandoned, then that was something neoclassical architects were prepared to do. Not every neoclassical building does this, of course, nor would this change come quickly, but the Prado’s clean, flat, rectilinear design reflects the beginning of a shift away from early modern Europe’s idolization of classical design and towards, arguably, the simple, purely geometric aspirations of Modernism and the advent of the International Style some 200 years after the Prado’s construction.

Photograph: Emilio J. Rodriguez Pasada
Architect: Juan de Villanueva

History of the Museum, Museo del Prado, 2018. https://www.museodelprado.es/en/museum/history-of-the-museum

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Brendan Glenn

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