Even the most confirmed armchair traveller can now tour one of the world's finest art collections. The 300 full-colour illustrations have been carefully chosen by the museum's directors to highlight the very best of the outstanding collection at the Prado, with photographs specially commissioned for the Abbeville Tiny Folio editions. Built in the late eighteenth century as a natural history museum, the Museo del Prado houses some of the world's finest paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts. Generations of Spanish royalty commissioned and collected the most celebrated art of their time, leaving behind them the magnificent paintings of Velasquez, Goya, Murillo, Ribera, and El Greco, along with masterpieces by Botticelli, Titian, Van Eyck, and Raphael, which are now among the Prado's most renowned paintings. Felipe Vincente Garin Llombart provides a guided tour of these legendary paintings, and of the museum's equally significant collection of sculpture, which includes works dating from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. The Prado's treasure trove of decorative arts is also covered. In his lively preface, Mr Garin Llombart describes the fascinating history of the museum and its acquisitions. Felipe Vincente Garin Llombart is director of the Museo del Prado.