“The Prado Museum’s Online Presence: From YouTube to Webby award-winning initiatives”

“The expression of those who walk in the art galleries reveals a poorly concealed disappointment at the fact that there are only paintings hanging there.” Just when we thought that the boom in immersive exhibitions had proven Walter Benjamin’s phrase right, we discovered that the big museums had not said their last word and were still talking on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube. So much and so well that the Prado has just won the Webby award for the best global art and culture initiative.

The Internet is full of people explaining things and giving their opinions about them. The advantage of an institution like the Prado is that it speaks first hand. And not only when it comes to its big stars (Las Meninas, The Garden of Earthly Delights). just click on the multimedia section of The Transfiguration Raphael’s (in Penni’s copy hanging on the ground floor) to get hooked on a short but fascinating film: not just the one that recounts the restoration of the painting, but the one about the panel that makes it the heaviest painting in the museum: 558 kilos. Hardly an amateur could do something like that from his house.

At his home, in a pasture in Alentejo or on a street in California, Alejandro Vergara has recorded the videos for his YouTube channel: Frame Stories. The difference is that Vergara is not an amateur but the Head of Conservation of Flemish Painting and Northern Schools of the Prado itself. Seeking to distinguish between scholar and sage, WH Auden said that dry scholarship is as useless as learning the Manhattan telephone directory. Wisdom requires intuition and the ability to relate, knowledge and gaze. Without technical fanfare and in just 10 minutes, with the Frame Stories de Vergara we managed to appreciate the synthesis between idealism and realism in Spinnersunderstand Mondrian’s debt to Vermeer or, thanks to a still life by Clara Peetersdiscover the enormous economic value of salt in the 17th century or the symbolic value of a simple table knife: when you were invited to eat at someone else’s house, you brought your own cutlery.

It takes a lot of knowledge to illustrate the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation with the resounding left hand and electric curls of the San Pablo de Rubens. In times of doubt, the artist offered forcefulness. Hence his enormous success. In his commentary, Alejandro Vergara, a world expert on the painter, points out that the saint does not look like a Christian martyr but rather a pagan god. Art allows it to be both. That’s how it was for many who treated him in life. Anyone who went to mass last Monday would hear the account of the Acts of the Apostles (14, 1-18) that includes his visit to Lystra with Saint Barnabas. After contemplating the miracles and healings of him, the Greeks of Asia Minor took them for Hermes and Zeus. Days later, they stoned them. We have spent 2,000 years of confusion and tension. It’s not all the fault of social media.