Joint project with National Gallery sees museum play host to no fewer than 126 works of Renaissance portraits from all over.

MADRID - It's the biggest show of the season at the Prado Museum. El retrato del Renacimiento (Portraits of the Renaissance) is being marketed as the first ever exhibition focusing specifically on Renaissance portraits from a global point of view, and it brings to Madrid no fewer than 126 works of art from major world collections.

The show which opened early June is a joint project between the Prado and the National Gallery in London, and organisers said that putting it together was a formidable challenge.

"I don't think there's been so many masterpieces in a single show at any other time in the history of this museum," said Miguel Zugaza, the director of the Prado, which displays over 1,300 paintings as part of its permanent collection.

Many more artworks are stored away in the museum's basement even though a new wing opened in 2007 to partly make up for this lack of exhibition space. The Renaissance exhibition is housed in the main building of the new wing, Edificio Jerónimos, next to the Jerónimos Church.

The exhibition features work by Jan van Eyck, Rubens, Piero della Francesca, Albrecht Dürer, Titian, Raphaël and Botticelli, among others, and focuses on artists from Europe's commercial and artistic powerhouses of the day, such as Flanders and Florence.

Some artists are being seen at the Prado for the first time ever, including Piero della Francesca and Jan van Eyck. "This show raises the museum's academic level," said Zugaza.

It is no coincidence that commissioners chose the 15th and 16th centuries as the time frame for the show.

The Renaissance was the time when portraiture became an autonomous genre in its own right, fuelled by a kind of "democratisation."

Suddenly, it was no longer just the royals and the clergy who could afford to have their picture painted, and people from all rungs of the social ladder began commissioning work.

Well-to-do couples had double portraits done, parents asked painters to immortalise their daughters before their wedding day, husbands left their likeness behind so their wives would remember them after death. Each portrait has a particular story behind it - of people showing off their power, trying to seduce someone else, demonstrating their religious devotion or displaying their intellectual interests.

For instance, the portrait of Mary Neville, or Baroness Dacre, made by Hans Eworth in 1555, shows the robust baroness sitting in a room with an inset portrait of her husband Thomas Fiennes, 9th Baron Dacre, in the back.

A name and a date on the frame provide a clue as to the meaning of this painting: it is the date when Fiennes was hanged as a common criminal at age 26 after being convicted of the murder of a gamekeeper during a poaching expedition.

The baroness was stripped of her title and her lands, although she later remarried and managed to get the family possessions back for her children.

Another very famous painting from the same era is Il tagliapanni (The Tailor) by Giovanni Battista Moroni, on loan from the National Gallery, which has the best collection of work by the Italian master of realistic portraits.

This work is a magnificent example of professional portraiture, as it shows a man with the tools of his trade, and it is also proof of the democratisation of the genre - so much so that the Italian author Pietro Aretino famously complained that one of the biggest misfortunes of his era was the fact that butchers and tailors were now getting their pictures done, too.

As a matter of fact, even children's drawings were showing up in paintings, as evidenced by Portrait of a Child with Drawing, by Giovanni Francesco Caroto, on loan from the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona. The scribbled paper that the child is holding evidences the influence of Leonardo Da Vinci's work on Caroto during the periods he spent in Milan.

The exhibition, which is organised in chronological order, shows how portraits were initially small, because they were meant to be kept inside boxes and taken out for viewing. Later in the 15th century, they started growing in size so everyone could contemplate them. The last room in the show holds pictures by Titian that stand at three meters tall.

Although the exhibition is as comprehensive as any, commissioner Miguel Falomir, head of the Italian Renaissance department at the Prado, admits there is at least one conspicuous absence.

"La Gioconda," he said. "The Louvre never lends her out. Although considering all the commotion over The Da Vinci Code, it's almost just as well."