There are many Goyas; the museum is the home of this remarkable but uneven painter.  We confess to a disappointment in his colour, though his paint was not new to us; but time has lent no pleasing patina to his canvases, the majority of which are rusty-looking, cracked, discoloured, dingy or dark.  There are several exceptions.  The nude and dressed full-lengths of the Duchess of Alba are in excellent preservation, and brilliant audacious painting it is.  A lovely creature, better-looking when reclining than standing, as a glance at her full-length portrait in the New York Hispanic Museum proves.  One of Goya’s best portraits hangs in the Prado, the seated figure of his brother-in-law, the painter Bayeu.  The Family of Charles IV, his patron and patroness, with the sheep-like head of the favourite De la Paz, is here in all its bitter humour; it might be called a satiric pendant to that other Familia, not many yards away, Las Meninas.  There are the designs for tapestries in the basement; Blind Man’s Buff and other themes illustrating national traits.  The equestrian portraits of Charles IV and his sweet, sinister spouse, Queen Maria Luisa, reveal a Goya not known to the world.  He could assume the grand manner when he so willed.  He could play the dignified master with the same versatility that he played at bull-fighting.  But his colour is often hot and muddy, and perhaps he will go down to that doubtful quantity, posterity, as an etcher and designer of genius.  After leaving the Prado you remember only the Caprices, the Bull-fights, and the Disaster of War plates; perhaps the Duchess of Alba, undressed, and in her dainty toreador costume.  The historic pictures are a tissue of horrors, patriotic as they are meant to be; they suggest the slaughter-house.  Goya has painted a portrait of Villanueva, the architect of the museum; and there is a solidly constructed portrait of Goya by V. Lopez.

The Raphaels have been reduced to two at the Prado:  The Holy Family with the Lamb, painted a year after the Ansedei Madonna, and that wonderful head of young Cardinal Bibbiena, keen-eyed and ascetic of features.  Alas! for the scholarship that attributed to the Divine Youth La Perla; the Madonna of the Fish; Lo Spasimo, Christ Bearing the Cross, and several other masterpieces.  Giulio Romana, Penni, and perhaps another, turned out these once celebrated and overpraised pictures—­overpraised even if they had come from the brush of Raphael himself.  The Cardinal’s portrait is worth the entire batch of them.

There is a Murillo gallery, full of representative work, the most important being St. Elizabeth of Hungary Tending the Sick, formerly in the Escorial.  The various Conceptions and saints’ heads are not missing, painted in his familiar colour key with his familiar false sentiment and always an eye to the appeal popular.  A mighty magnet for the public is Murillo.  The peasants flock to him on Sundays as to a sanctuary.  There the girls see themselves