Exhibitions

Botany in Art: Plants in the Collections of the Museo del Prado

Girona, Spain

This is part of the Prado Itinerante programme, organised by the Museo Nacional del Prado and Fundación ”la Caixa”. A garden hidden inside the Prado: flowers, trees, herbs and leaves that are not background — they are meaning.

Jan van Kessel el Viejo, Bodegón de flores

Image credit

Jan van Kessel el Viejo, Bodegón de flores, 1633-1666. Óleo sobre cobre © Museo Nacional del Prado

The Movement

Baroque, Dutch Golden Age, High Renaissance, Painting

ArtLovers Tip

A poetic and intelligent Prado exhibition outside Madrid — perfect for seeing art as a living garden, where every leaf may be telling a story. Medium-density exhibition. You can visit it in around 45–60 minutes, but allow 75 minutes if you want to read the botanical explanations, enjoy the aromas and identify the plant details carefully.

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

This exhibition invites you to look at the Prado in a completely different way: through plants.

It brings together 53 paintings and sculptures from the Museo del Prado to reveal how botany has been part of art for centuries — not only as decoration, but as narrative, symbol, atmosphere and knowledge. Trees, flowers, herbs and gardens often build the world around a scene, but they can also carry religious, mythological, social or emotional meaning.

The exhibition is organised into four sections, turning the visit almost into a walk through an imagined garden populated by different plant species. To make the botanical layer more visible, the route includes aromas from selected plants and photographs created or intervened by Paula Codoñer, helping visitors identify the species represented in the artworks.

Worth the trip

Because it changes the way you see old paintings.

After this exhibition, a landscape is no longer just a landscape. A flower is no longer just a detail. A tree, a herb, a fruit or a branch can become a clue — about faith, power, class, medicine, mythology, daily life or the artist’s way of making a scene believable.

For Artlovers, this is worth visiting because it makes the Prado feel fresh, intimate and alive. It is a beautiful example of how a great museum can be rediscovered through a small detail: the plant you almost missed.

How to experience it

Go slowly and look for the “secondary” details.

Instead of standing in front of each work asking only who painted it or what story it tells, ask: what is growing here? A plant may be there for beauty, but it may also be there to guide your reading of the scene.

This is a perfect exhibition for people who love art, gardens, symbolism, nature, slow looking — or simply a more sensory way to enter the Prado’s universe.

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