The Prado has decided to turn its back on its visitors. Those attending the Madrid museum’s latest exhibition are greeted not by the full splendour of its most famous work, Velázquez’s Las Meninas, but by an austere and lifesize recreation of the reverse of the painting.
Elsewhere, among the self-portraits of Goya, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, there is a seemingly devout nun baring her bottom, a painting whose frame bears witness to its seizure by the Nazis, and five battered wooden beams from the original stretcher of Picasso’s Guernica.
