A Botanist at the Prado

What we now call the Museo del Prado was founded by a man named Charles. Charles III (King of Spain), Charles I (Duke of Parma and Piacenza), Charles VII (King of Naples), and Charles V (King of Sicily) were, in fact, all the same Charles, and it was as the monarch of Spain that he hired architect Juan de Villanueva to design both a building to house the Gabinete de Historia Natural and an enclosure that still exists today as Madrid’s Botanical Garden. Decades later, when that one Charles with all his numerals was nothing but a memory, the Gabinete became the Museo del Prado. A little over two centuries after that, another man, a landscape gardener, strolled pensively through its galleries. He invites us now on a guided tour, mindful of the lasting influence of both the botanical garden and the building’s origin as a cabinet of natural history. Eduardo Barba Gómez looks at art with a distinctive gaze, and with his guidance even readers who know nothing of botany will be able to spot the great mullein in a painting by Joachim Patinir, the bitter orange and clematis in a work by Fra Angelico, the Solomon’s seal and dragon tree in a triptych of Hieronymus Bosch, and the mallow or curly dock in a Velázquez.