Prado, if you have 5 euros you can help the museum buy a painting by Simon Vouet

The Prado Museum in Madrid has launched a “micromecenatism” campaign, titled Súmate al Pra do (“Join the Prado”), to acquire a painting by Simon Vouet (Paris, 1590 - 1649), the Portrait of a Little Girl with a Dove, an unpublished work that will complement the other two masterpieces by the French Caravaggesque artist already in the Spanish museum, namely Holy Family with St. Catherine and The Allegory of Time Won by Hope and Beauty. This would be an important acquisition because it would make the connections between the works more explicit: in particular, experts noted how the personification of beauty in the allegorical painting bears a striking resemblance to the little girl in the portrait that the Prado intends to acquire (perhaps, the same model posed for the two paintings). The painting, of very high quality, is owned by a foreign family residing in Spain (which preferred not to divulge its identity) and is willing to sell it for the sum of 200,000 euros.

And so here is the idea of the campaign: everyone can contribute as much as they wish to reach the total of 200,000 euros, and the minimum donation that can be sent to the museum is just 5 euros. “Your generosity,” reads the Prado’s website page dedicated to the campaign, “can turn you into a donor to the Prado Museum. With a contribution starting from 5 euros you can make sure that every year about three million people can contemplate, in the halls of the Prado, the same woman in two different moments of her life.” This is followed by an invitation to share the initiative on social media with the hashtag #súmatealprado. One can donate via the web but also directly at the Prado, following the instructions of the halls staff.

“The Prado will celebrate its bicentenary next year,” recalled the museum’s director, Miguel Falomir, “and it will do so by remembering what has been the most important gift given to Spain in the last two hundred years: a museum of everyone and for everyone, and now offering the opportunity for everyone to become a patron of the Prado.”

Andrés Úbeda, assistant director of the museum, goes into detail: “Simon Vouet is one of the most fascinating artists in the Roman scene of the second and third decade of the seventeenth century. The allegory of time vanquished by hope and beauty is one of the most celebrated works in Vouet’s catalog, a work made towards the end of his Roman sojourn in 1627, and in it appears one of the most humiliated figures of time in all seventeenth-century art, because time is vanquished by two women who laugh in the face of its impotence. One of the two women holds an anchor, an attribute that distinguishes hope, while behind the vanquished and humiliated time appears the figure of a naked woman carrying a spear and similarly humiliating time and grabbing it by the hair so as to prevent it from any movement. The most interesting circumstance for us is that the portrait of this naked woman, the portrait of beauty, bears a striking resemblance to the face of the little girl in the painting that the Prado seeks to acquire with this micromecenatism campaign. It is probably the same woman, although her appearance changes slightly as a result of the time that has elapsed between the first and second painting. In the portrait the subject appears slightly younger; it must be a painting made around 1620-1622. When we discovered the portrait of the little girl with the dove in a private Spanish collection, we were fascinated by the idea of linking the two works, and then the idea that the two works could be kept in the same museum and become the heritage of all the people who visit the Prado.”

Pictured: Simon Vouet, Portrait of a Little Girl with Dove (1620-1622; oil on canvas, 66.5 x 49.5 cm; Private Collection)

Prado, if you have 5 euros you can help the museum buy a painting by Simon Vouet

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