A Short Grand Tour

Museum visits are a fascinating way to look at the world from the works of art. Apparently, it is possible for visitors to walk through the halls of a museum without hardly stopping to observe the works on display. One can sense in those absorbed gazes of the visitor-traveller an eagerness to gather in a short period everything that hangs on the walls, or perhaps, they intend to retain in the memory any artistic object without pretension or objective, nor criticism or judgment about it. To reflect on this issue of the pleasures presented by a visit to a museum, we wanted to think about the ways of visiting it, from a programmed and organized tour to the free walk through the rooms to finding and contemplating the piece that interests us the most, the lesser-known works or simply its architecture. In this paper, we describe a teaching methodology that, although not unique, allowed a group of architecture students to discover the Museo Nacional del Prado (MNP) from different points of view. In this short tour inside the Museum, it was possible, on the one hand, to improve the ability to observe and, on the other, to enrich skills not previously experienced in drawing.