Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Our first full day in Madrid, we opted to start off our museum frenzy with the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Acclaimed as one of the most extensive private collections of predominantly European art, the museum is the legacy of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, a German-Hungarian art connousieur, which boasts of a wide array of artistic styles ranging from Medieval times to more contemporary paintings.

The beauty of the museum is that there are examples of artwork by all of the big names in Europe housed all under the same roof.

Here is the blurp by wikipedia describing some of the highlights of the museum:

"One of the focal points is the early European painting, with a major collection of trecento and quattrocento (i.e. 14th and 15th century) Italian paintings by Duccio, and his contemporaries, and works of the early Flemish and Dutch painters like Jan Van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Holbein. Other highlights include works by the most famous Renaissance and Baroque painters, including Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, Murillo, Rembrandt and Frans Hals and wonderful portraits by Domenico Ghirlandaio and Vittore Carpaccio. Also important for the Museum's collection are Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by artists like Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Vincent Van Gogh, as well as twentieth century masterpieces like a Cubist work by Picasso or late works by Piet Mondrian and Edward Hopper."

While we were there, we were lucky in that the temporary exhibit was about Miró, a contemporary Spanish artist from the twentieth century who is known for his use of vibrant colors to depict objects in a primitive fashion, creating paintings that have the appearance that they could have been created from the perspective of a child.

For other art aficcionados out there, here is the link to the virtual tour of the musem.

http://www.museothyssen.org/thyssen/coleccion/visita_virtual.html