Moments from Museo del Prado

Opened to the public in 1819, the Prado grew directly out of the Spanish royal collection, centuries of paintings acquired by Habsburg and Bourbon monarchs who had both the wealth and the taste to commission or buy some of the most significant painters in European history, which is why the museum's holdings in Velazquez, Goya, and Bosch are essentially unmatched anywhere else on Earth. Velazquez's Las Meninas, a painting that famously turns the act of looking back on the viewer, the artist himself included in the scene, painting what appears to be us, anchors the collection and has occupied roughly the same central room for generations of visitors to argue over.

Goya's Black Paintings, a series he painted directly onto the walls of his own house in his final, embittered years and which were later transferred to canvas and installed here, are worth deliberately seeking out in a separate wing, they're a genuinely different, darker Goya than the elegant royal portraits most visitors expect. Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, an astonishingly strange triptych of paradise, indulgence, and hell, rewards getting as close as museum barriers allow, its detail is dense enough that reproductions flatten out entire scenes worth of small, bizarre incident.