MADRID.- The Museo del Prado’s thematic routes are intended to encourage a new way of looking at the Museum. To achieve this, the Prado requests the collaboration of professionals from outside the institution and the range of disciplines normally represented in it. The aim is to offer visitors a different, unusual but also rigorous gaze on the collections and one that focuses on themes and issues which normally go unnoticed, like previous examples “Reflexions of the Cosmos”, “The Female Perspective”, “Calderón and Paintings and “Another colecctions: the Museo del Prado Frames”.

This is the case with “A botanical stroll through the Prado”, a stimulating thematic route created by Eduardo Barba Gómez, gardener and researcher on art and botany Through 26 works by artists of the significance of Patinir, Fra Angelico, Titian, Velázquez, Rubens and Zurbarán, it shows how observing and reflecting on depictions of plants and flowers in works of art creates a connection in time between the artist and the visitor.

Each era has represented plants in a different way, with greater or lesser attention paid to detail and botanical fidelity. In the Romanesque period the extreme simplification of their forms gave plants a particularly unique beauty. In the Gothic period artists aimed at precision and the correct description of each plant and flower, and it can be said that it was at that moment that the botanical portrait became a distinct element within the work of art, culminating in the Renaissance. In that period and as a legacy of previous centuries, plants proliferate in the foreground of works, represented in a notably naturalistic manner.

The species chosen for depiction could be present in the artist's immediate surroundings, even just outside his studio. On other occasions and as a result of expeditions to different parts the world, exotic plants from distant countries were added to enrich the range of artistic flora, particularly from the 16th century onwards. In all these cases works of art reveal artists' fascinating ability to observe the natural world, delicately portraying the plants as if they were another character in the scene.

The route covers a broad chronological span, from a Roman classical sculpture to an early 18th-century canvas. In addition, it focuses on a wide range of supports, including marble, semi-precious stones and of course panels and canvases, all of them providing space for botanical representation.

Eduardo Barba Gómez

Eduardo Barba Gómez is a gardener, landscape designer, professor of gardening and researcher on botany in works of art. He has published several books which look at plants in different contexts while every week he writes and talks about gardening, both in his column for El País and his radio slot “Getting into a garden” on Cadena SER. Barba Gómez also specialises in identifying plants present in works of art for national and foreign collections. Much of his botanical research activity is undertaken at the Museo del Prado and shared in the form of catalogue texts, live features on the Museum’s social networks, and lectures.