Museum spree - Prado 2

My first Prado post concentrated mainly on the by-standing masters, not focusing on the pop-stars of the place - Velasques and El Greco, or should i also say Ribera, Zurbaran, Murillo - or Rubens, Titien or Tintoretto?...Choice is too large to keep it real - that is why i had to go there for two days in a row to get my head straight about at least some of it.

To start with the inspirers of this whole lot of revolutionaries, here are the two incredible paintings, hanging side by side and illuminating the space around them, first Annunciation by Fra Angelico - angelically pure, the jpg below is far from doing it justice:

And Messina's dead Christ with an angel, something close to da Vinci or Ruben´s angels, but again so movingly human, it could by itself resume the whole Renaissance:

Being religious or not, one has to appreciate religion for giving the impetus to the existence of all this art. In Prado, there is no way of getting around religion. And each painter seems to have his Pieta in there, pick and choose the one you like! My two favorite ones are Flemish, Van der Weyden´s Descent from the Cross - that was originally destined for Isabella the Catholica and Fernando's burial chapel in Granada:

And Anton van Dyck´s Pieta, that beats them all - maybe not Michel Angelo's, but that's in a different register:

And the last, but not least in this religious feast - Caravaggio. Only one painting of his exposed in Prado, like Rembrandt´s, but an impressive one. Used less to inspire religious faith, but to rather show his aesthetic standards, it stays in my memory, David and Goliath:

Hmm, so again no time to even start speaking about Velasquez, El Greco, and Rubens...it will have to wait for a Prado 3 intervention!