“The Word Made Image” – At Prado Museum

For the WYD, Madrid’s Prado Museum is displaying the thematic exhibition “The Word Made Image – Paintings of Christ”, featuring thirteen masterpieces that show different scenes from the life of Christ. The collection will be enriched by Caravaggio’s The Deposition, a jewel of the Vatican Museums

• Where: Prado Museum (C/Ruiz de Alarcón, 24)

• When: July 21 to September 18 (9 am – 8 pm). Closed Mondays. August 16, 17, and 18: from 9:00 to Midnight.

• Free guided tours: August: Tuesday through Friday at 11:30 am and 4:30 pm. From Tuesday, August 16 to August 21: 10 am, 12 pm and 4:30 pm.

• Languages: explanatory signs, free brochures, and a pocket guide (5 €) in Spanish and English.

• Free admission for registered WYD pilgrims, August 16 to 21.

Coming to know Christ through beauty

Through this selection of paintings, the exhibition aims at offering a visual display of some of the metaphorical descriptions that Christ used to refer to Himself, or that are attributed to Him in the Gospels (The Good Shepherd, The Light of the World, The Way, Truth, and the Life, as well as Agnus Dei or Salvatoris Mundi), from the hands of great artists who worked to turn these words into images, resulting in an authentic "visual theology".

The display, which features a total of fourteen works, offers a highlight of the best schools of painting represented in the Prado Museum: first, the Spanish school with painters such as Velazquez, El Greco, Ribera, Zurbaran, Murillo, Juan de Juanes, or the author of the Romanic mural paintings in the Church of Vera Cruz Maderuelo (Segovia).

These are joined by the Flemish school, offering a representation from the time of its creation by Van der Weyden and its culmination, by Rubens. One cannot overlook the presence of the Italian school, with artists such as Fra Angelico, and within it the Venetian school in particular, with Sebastiano del Piombo, Tintoretto, and Veronese.

The exhibition will comment on the work from an artistic, iconographic, and religious standpoint. This information will be complemented in a free brochure and a pocket guide available in English and Spanish.