Over the years, I’ve told people that if they want to develop a deeper understanding of Spain, and a meaningful empathy for it, they need to start with the Escorial. Completed in 1584, it’s the architectural embodiment of Philip II, Spain’s empire-building king, and the necropolis for Spanish kings and queens. Its austere aesthetic is distinctly Spanish. Both palace and monastery, it unites church and crown. A basilica, a university, and a library, it’s an all-purpose emblem of a culture. Franco’s tomb was deliberately placed next to it, so that era now has a place in the Spanish sun. The Escorial is not in Madrid or Granada or Seville but in the forbidding Guadarrama Mountains, lean and mean like so much of Spain outside its cities.

After seeing “A Place of Memory,” I’d say the Prado tells the story of Spain as convincingly and hauntingly as the Escorial. The museum’s history and Spain’s run on parallel tracks.1

This was plain as I visited Madrid last December with Miguel Falomir, the Prado’s director since 2017. We met at the Casón del Buen Retiro, one of two buildings remaining from Philip IV’s Palace of Buen Retiro. We looked at the lovely ceiling in the king’s former ballroom, painted by Luca Giordano, one of many foreign artists commissioned to work for Spanish patrons. The space now houses the Prado’s great art library, open to scholars. Libraries once gave bureaucrats in the Franco era the jitters. God