Masterpieces by Velázquez and his contemporaries come to Barcelona
Over 50 artworks by the Spanish painter and other old masters from the El Prado’s Baroque collection will be on display until March
Geniuses such as that of Spanish painter Velázquez are few and far between – and now, his unrivaled artwork comes to Barcelona’s CaixaForum Museum.
Starting Friday, the first large-scale exhibit on Velázquez will open its doors in Barcelona, featuring the baroque collection from Madrid’s Museo del Prado. But masterpieces aren’t created in a vacuum, so the exhibit ‘Velazquez and the Golden Age’ doesn’t focus only on the Spanish painter.
Instead, it aims to show that reality wasn’t as compartmentalized as we like to think – art was an international language, even back then. Exhibit curator Javier Portús Pérez explained how “Paintings crossed national borders, artists traveled from one court to another, stimuli and influences were extraordinarily varied.”
In the exhibit, seven great works by the Spanish painter are surrounded by over half a hundred more by artists of his time – including Titian, El Greco, Rubens, Claude Lorrain. To be found at the CaixaForum in the Catalan capital, it will be open until March.
Diego Velazquez was born in Seville and died in Madrid in 1660, and his work paints a picture of the 17th century, in King Philip IV’s court…a time long gone. But centuries later, this very art would give inspiration to realists, impressionists, surrealist—and surely will continue doing so, for generations to come.