The Prado Makes Room to Show Off More Jewels , Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Andrea Comas/Reuters - The lobby, top, of a new extension helps upgrade the Prado.

According to the New York Times,  for many years, the Prado was almost a secret in plain sight. Years of Spanish isolation, neglect under Franco, then institutional incompetence, compounded the impression of narcolepsy. Melancholy reports of leaks in the ceiling, or yet another director promising change before evaporating, overshadowed the odd loan exhibition. Save for busloads of Japanese tourists, the world simply seemed to pass the Prado by.

Truth be told, it was nice. While every other museum concocted Monet blockbusters and fancy new buildings by celebrity architects to name after trustees and satisfy the bean counters who judge success by the number of visitors through the turnstiles rather than by the quality and care of the collection, the Prado stuck with Velázquez and Goya and Titian and Tintoretto in rooms of increasingly shabby grandeur. Before such pictures, nothing else really mattered.

That was then. The Prado has in the last several years hired a crew of gifted young curators under an ambitious young director with Byronic good looks named Miguel Zugaza. Now there’s a serious and world-class exhibition program, more than two million visitors annually (this year a record number is expected) — and, just opening, a 237,000-square-foot extension.

It’s said to have cost several times more than was budgeted; but then, so did your kitchen. The final price tag was $219 million. Devised by the 70-year-old Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, it moves the museum, stuck so long in the 19th century, into the 21st by modernizing and rationalizing what had become, willy-nilly, a haphazard and disorganized physical plant.

Before, whenever an exhibition went up, some of the permanent collection had to come down. Galleries became storage rooms for lack of better places to put the art. Visitors came through side doors not designed to handle mobs, because there was no functional main entrance.

The extension, by freeing up space in the original building (half again as many paintings will have room to go on view), deals with such unglamorous necessities as a new, centralized point of entry, rooms for temporary shows (totaling 15,000 square feet, no minor addition), a lecture hall and — replacing a gulag-style basement cafeteria — a new cafe, all black marble and wood. The cafe is comically small, which actually speaks well of the museum’s priorities. The whole enterprise has the remarkable (for these days) goal of letting the museum do what a museum is supposed to: show its collection better. The plan is so conservative that it’s radical.

The old Prado, a stolid neo-Classical behemoth with various expansions added to it since the early 19th century, naturally became an object of Spanish veneration over the years. Frankly, it’s not a particularly graceful work of architecture, but love is blind. The museum’s new, centralized entrance smartly revives Juan de Villanueva’s original 1785 plan, connecting what’s called the Velázquez door, facing one of Madrid’s great boulevards, to a new vestibule. The vestibule is shaped like an apse, in stone and bronze, with walls colored what Mr. Moneo calls Pompeiian red, although you might find yourself thinking of a watermelon.

From the vestibule, Mr. Moneo leads visitors toward a second, huge wedge-shape lobby, cut into the slope behind the old museum, with a bronze ceiling and floor-to-ceiling windows. From here you reach the new galleries for temporary shows.

The structure’s best feature is a rooftop garden, fitted seamlessly into the streetscape and planted with handsome box hedges. The plan otherwise plainly solves a thorny architectural problem: how to shoehorn various basic services underground and behind the old building, then connect the old museum to a 17th-century cloister a block away.

The cloister of the Jerónimos, as it’s called, long a local wreck, became cannon fodder for the French 200 years ago and was left to crumble under Franco. Nobody paid much heed before the museum announced in the 1990s that it would take over the site, after which neighbors, foreseeing years of noisy construction, declared the expansion plan a sacrilege.

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