Until around 1985 the contents of this museum virtually overflowed the premises of a legendary villa near Lugano, Switzerland. One of the most frequently visited sites of Switzerland, the collection had been laboriously amassed over a period of about 60 years by the Thyssen-Bornemisza family, scions of a shipping, banking, mining, and chemical fortune whose roots began around 1905 in Holland, Germany, and Hungary. Experts had proclaimed it one of the world's most extensive and valuable privately owned collections of paintings, rivaled only by the legendary holdings of Elizabeth II.

For tax and insurance reasons, and because the collection had outgrown the boundaries of the lakeside villa that housed it, the collection was discreetly marketed in the early 1980s to the world's major museums. Amid endless intrigue, a litany of glamorous supplicants from eight different nations came calling. Among them were Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles; trustees of the Getty Museum in Malibu, California; the president of West Germany; the duke of Badajoz, brother-in-law of Carlos II; even emissaries from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida--all hoping to acquire the collection for their respective countries or entities.

Eventually, thanks partly to the lobbying by Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza's fifth wife, a Spanish-born beauty (and former Miss Spain) named Tita, the collection was awarded to Spain for $350 million. Controversies over the public cost of the acquisition raged for months. Despite the brouhaha, various estimates have placed the value of this collection at anywhere between $1 billion and $3 billion.

To house the collection, an 18th-century building adjacent to the Prado, the Villahermosa Palace, was retrofitted with the appropriate lighting and security devices, and renovated at a cost of $45 million. The rooms are arranged numerically so that by following the order of the various rooms (numbers 1 to 48, spread out over three floors), a logical sequence of European painting can be traced from the 13th through the 20th century. The nucleus of the collection consists of 700 world-class paintings. They include works by, among others, El Greco, Velázquez, Dürer, Rembrandt, Watteau, Canaletto, Caravaggio, Hals, Memling, and Goya.

Unusual among the world's great art collections because of its eclecticism, the Thyssen group also contains goodly numbers of 19th- and 20th-century paintings by many of the notable French impressionists, as well as works by Picasso, John Singer Sargent, Kirchner, Nolde, and Kandinsky--artists whose previous absence from Spanish museums had become increasingly obvious. This museum has attracted many millions of visitors since its long-awaited opening; be prepared for magnificent art but long lines.