How the Prado is reinventing itself

The Prado's ambitious Vermeer exhibition is a daring leap for the 218-year-old museum, and signals the spectacular transformation it has experienced in the past year.

The Prado's ambitious Vermeer exhibition is a daring leap for the 218-year-old museum, and signals the spectacular transformation it has experienced in the past year.

This is the first big exhibition to contain not one single work held by the museum: Prado blockbusters have always focused on its own treasures. Vermeer, scarcely known in Spain, offers a style alien to everything the Spanish are used to. How will Spaniards, steeped in the baroque flamboyance of their beloved Velazquez, Rubens, Goya and the rest, take to the restrained interiors of the quiet man from Delft?

"We deliberately opted for an exhibition of works we didn't have," says Miguel Zugaza, who took over as director a year ago after having transformed Bilbao's Fine Arts Museum. "We want to offer people the chance to become familiar with great works they are rarely able to see." The chief curator, Gabriele Finaldi, a 37-year-old Anglo-Italian, shares the sense of adventure. "It's been so exciting unpacking these wonderful paintings. It wasn't clear until the last moment how they would combine," he says.

These two men, along with the show's curator, Alejandro Vergara, exude an easy glamour light-years from the professorly gentlemen who used to run Prado shows. They are the new generation of globe-trotting art professionals who combine scholarship with showmanship.

Their revolution is commercially driven. Vermeer is the Prado's first major exhibition exclusively sponsored by Spain's biggest bank, the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, in a pioneering four-year deal worth €2.5m (£1.6m) that was signed last month. Other benefactors are being wooed to boost the €25m annual budget. A new government law spurs the Prado to court private sponsors and break dependence on state control and public funds.

The Prado has long been dogged by scandals, bungling and pennypinching. Political appointees came and went, spreading unhappiness and insecurity among staff, while the 1.8 million annual visitors were treated with indifference. The Prado became fusty and confusing, an effort to visit.

Spain has often treated the Prado as its royals once treated the artworks now housed there: as a luxury plaything, adored and neglected. The new team is buffing it up as a precious commodity displayed in the best light for visitors and would-be patrons to admire. The hard-nosed, mercantile, progressive spirit of Vermeer is making the Prado smart.