Prado Picture Gallery

The Prado museum is famous for its paintings collection, which spans the 16th to the 19th century. Consequently, the analysis of paintings (found in the Guided Tours section) rates as easily the best bit of this website. Each month an individual painting is analysed in considerable detail, with very instructive results. A similar amount of care is taken with the sections describing the history of the museum's collections, architecture and location. The text lists dates, facts and events; some personalities discussed have links to their portraits, and it is difficult to imagine a fuller explanation of the museum's history. The General information is full and useful, even if the information for visitors does have the rather odd title of Practical File. Indeed, the whole site suffers from some peculiarities of expression or, more realistically, translation. In some cases, these are quite charming.

There is so much on the site that it is forgivable that some of the more complicated technical features don't work as well as they might. On some occasions, the online search for paintings, cross-referenced by period, style and country, produced a string of error codes (some in Spanish) and no results. To be fair, on subsequent visits the search worked very well, producing pertinent and accurate results.