Because of its stature as a justifiably world-famous museum and art gallery, I’ve been meaning to write about the Prado (Museo Nacional de Prado – to give it its proper title) for some time now. The problem in writing about a museum, however impressive and world-class in might be, is just that – so much writing about a wonder that can only really be experienced visually. What are pictures, great works of art, after all, if they cannot be seen?

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, and in particular the good people at internet wizards, Google Earth, it is now possible to take an extremely realistic, virtual taster of just some of the delights of the national gallery in Madrid. The software’s virtual tour currently contains just fourteen of the all-time masterpieces housed by the museum. But what samples they are! The fourteen pictures accessible through the website are ultra-high resolution images – and when they say ultra-high, this is very high resolution indeed, some 14,000 million pixels or 1,400 times the resolution you can obtain on a fairly high-end 10-megapixel digital camera.

At this sort of resolution, of course, you can not only view the whole picture, but home in on particular details – probably even more closely than with the naked human eye. The painter’s brushstrokes, therefore, can be brought to life on the screen and even the “craquelure” of the varnish on the piece of art.

When I tried it, I was amazed by and I especially enjoyed a viewing of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch. This is an incredibly detailed oil on wooden panel triptych which opens up to an actual area of 220cm x 389 cm (about 7 ft x 13 ft). The left-hand panel depicts Paradise, with the creation of Eve and the fountain of life, while the right-hand panel is of hell. The centrepiece is an incredibly busy portrayal of all of life’s pleasures and delights – invariably fleeting and driven by lust, desire and sinfulness. It was painted some time between 1500 and 1505. This strange and magical garden of earthly delights hung in the bedroom of King Philip II of Spain and the internet tour allows the viewer to home in on the smallest detail and activity imagined and painted by Bosch.

This is just one of the paintings on the virtual tour and the ability to be able to study even one example in such fantastic detail makes fourteen masterpieces seem like a surprisingly large number. But, then, this number is dwarfed by the 9,000 or so works of art (mostly paintings) in the Prado’s possession, although there is space for only 1,500 of them to be on display at any one time.

In any event, of course, and despite all the superlatives describing the stunning feat pulled off by Google, a virtual tour on the internet must still take second place to actually visiting the Prado. In all, the museum houses one of the finest collections of European art anywhere in the world – from the 12^th to the 19^th centuries, drawing principally from the former Royal Spanish Collection. Not surprisingly, the Prado houses by far the best and the most prestigious collection of Spanish art in the world. Thus, there are the finest examples of paintings by Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, as well El Greco, Bartolomé Estéban Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbarán, and most other leading Spanish old masters. There are also collections representing the Flemish School of painting and sixteenth century Italian works. As a Spanish Royal Collection it is perhaps not surprising that English and Dutch Protestant schools of art are absent.

The Royal Collection was started by Queen Isabel (La Católica) in the 1500s and added to by her successors all the way into the 19^th Century. In 1734, a large part of the collection was lost in a fire at El Alcazar, which at that time was the royal palace and occupied the site of what is now the Palacio Real. This makes the sheer size of the surviving collection even more remarkable and displays the added interest of reflecting the tastes and choices exercised by a long line of Spanish monarchs.

When the building of the Prado was first conceived, during Spain’s age of enlightenment, it was as an intended to be a Natural Sciences museum. It was commissioned by King Carlos III in 1785 and  initally designed in the neo-classical style by Juan de Villanueva. The Prado (literally, “meadow”) was part of a grand civic building scheme intended to create a monumental urban environment in one of the best areas of Madrid. Work on the building stopped at the end of Carlos’ reign, however, when the Napoleonic Peninsular Wars saw parts of the structure being used by French troops as headquarters for their cavalry and to store gunpowder.

Building work resumed when Carlos’ grandson, King Fernando VII, ascended the throne and it was decided to use the Prado for housing the Royal Art Collection. The commission for re-designing the building for this purpose was handed to Joseph Bonaparte (brother of Napoleon) and the Royal Collection finally went on public display when the Prado opened in 1819, thus becoming one of the world’s first public art galleries.

Given the sheer size of the art collection to be housed, the Prado very quickly proved itself too small to display anything like the entire collection and since the first major extension in 1918, the building itself and sites nearby were developed more or less continuously during the twentieth century.

Some pieces in the priceless collection have endured especially hazardous journeys. During the Civil War, for example, a total of 353 paintings, 168 drawings and the Dauphin’s Treasure were crated and sent first to Valancia and then, via Girona, to Geneva in Switzerland. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, however, all these works of art had to be returned to Spain, travelling across France by train in the dead of night.