Casón del Buen Retiro

The Casón del Buen Retiro is one of only two buildings that survived the destruction of the Buen Retiro Palace, from which it takes its name. It currently houses the Prado Museum's Study Center, which boasts a spectacular art library where visitors can freely admire the beautiful frescoes by Luca Giordano that decorate the vault of the former Ballroom. It was built in 1637 to a design by Alonso Carbonell. Its main façade, facing west, is by Velázquez Bosco. The most recent restoration was carried out by Jaime Tarruel. For several decades, the building housed the Prado's collection of 19th-century paintings, some 3,000 works. It also displayed Picasso's Guernica after the famous painting arrived from the United States. In 1992, Picasso's work was moved to the Reina Sofía Museum, and the Casón was closed for extensive renovations. Now fully restored, it houses the Prado Museum's library, one of Spain's finest and least-known art libraries. It specializes in painting and sculpture from the Middle Ages to the 19th century and also holds significant collections of drawings, prints, classical sculpture, and decorative arts. It houses a collection of over 100,000 books, including monographs and reference works, 1,500 journal titles, 260 auction catalog titles, audiovisual materials, specialized electronic resources, posters and brochures, and preserves a remarkable bibliographic heritage of printed and manuscript works predating 1910, of notable importance due to its quantity (7,000 volumes), its specialized nature (treatises on painting and architecture, festival books, drawing manuals and books on iconography, emblems, anatomy and physiognomy), and the rarity of some of its copies. The Luca Giordano vault. The library occupies several floors of the Casón del Buen Retiro. Once past the entrance hall from Alfonso XII Street, the reader finds the Reading Room and an open-access reference library, which occupies the former Ballroom beneath the spectacular vault decorated with frescoes painted in 1692 by Luca Giordano (1634-1705), one of the masterpieces of the Prado Museum, representing the apotheosis of the Spanish monarchy.