Culture : Artistic ‘Heart of Spain’ Is Scheduled for Surgery : At 176 years old, the Prado museum is showing its age. It needs roof repairs, more space and a general updating. But not everyone wants to spend the money.

Jose Maria Luzon is an affable archeologist who labors amid the majesty of Velasquez and Titian, the virtuosity of Goya and Rubens, and the certainty of few illusions.

“We really have gotten ourselves into a fine mess, haven’t we?” asked an undismayed Luzon, assessing the situation at the Prado, the Madrid art museum that is the pinnacle of Spanish culture.

Now in its 176th year, the Prado is in trouble, a victim of its age, the sheer size of its collections--its very popularity. And Luzon, its director, is looking for answers.

“From the beginning, El Prado has been a symbol for Spain,” he pointed out. “In the 19th Century, a rabbi visiting from Sweden wrote that ‘El Prado is the heart of Spain.’ Now we must perform open heart surgery.”

Museum administrators, the Spanish art world and politicians of every stripe say the Prado must be expanded and modernized without compromising its character or the beauty of its setting. Agreement in principle there is, but discord and difficulties galore in practice.

“The complexities are many,” Luzon admitted. Nevertheless, he said, museums must evolve to reflect changing times, and El Prado’s turn has come.

Located along a leafy boulevard in the heart of the Spanish capital, the Prado boasts the world’s greatest display of Spanish paintings and breathtaking Flemish and Italian collections. Its galleries resound with masterworks bought by Spanish kings from the 16th to the 19th centuries and also include paintings acquired over the years from monasteries and convents.

Foreigners passing through Spain might shrug at bullfights, but scarcely any resist the Prado’s lure.

“Every day our halls are filled by visitors who know nothing about Spain or art. Tourists straight from Tokyo on their way to Toledo [Spain] come to El Prado from the airport. They faint here all the time. Exhaustion? Hunger? Who knows?” said Jesus Urrea, one of the museum’s deputy directors.

Urrea said the Prado is bursting the seams of a neoclassical palace begun in 1775 under architect Juan de Villanueva, a building that itself is a masterpiece begging for restoration and expansion.

The Prado owns more treasure than it can display: Of more than 7,000 paintings on the museum’s books, fewer than 2,000 are on display, about 3,000 are on loan to Spanish government offices or provincial museums and the rest are in storage. Not all of them are worth displaying, museum officials say, but there are plenty awaiting a well-deserved chance to be enjoyed by the public.

“We need space for both permanent and temporary exhibitions. It’s a vicious circle. We need more people: restorers, investigators, curators. But if you gave us 25 tomorrow, we’d have no place to put them without sacrificing display space,” Urrea said.

Administrators of the state-run museum work in an 18-office management suite in a wing of the building that displayed Italian paintings in the first part of this century, and could again if the expansion takes place.

Like many world museums, change came to the Prado with the advent of mass tourism in the 1960s, a development that has stepped up activity of all the world’s museums and the face of most of them.

In 1994, 1.6 million visitors came to the Prado, leaving $5 million in museum shops and uncounted new strains on the old building.

In October, 1993, to national embarrassment and international alarm, water from the leaky roof sputtered into the gallery that houses Velasquez’s priceless “Maids of Honor” (“Las Meninas”), a stunning, witty behind-the-scenes glimpse of royal court life.

“It was just a few drops on a day of terrible rain and wind, but it proved the detonator to allow us to move in a new direction,” Urrea said.

The government has authorized $10 million for roof repairs.

Some critics argue that overhaul of the museum, both physically and operationally, is long overdue.

“Over the years, administration of the Prado has been a disaster,” said Rafael Sierra, who writes about art for the Madrid daily El Mundo. “It has hardly changed since the 19th Century, while museums like the Louvre in Paris and National Gallery in London have grown and been transformed.”

Commented conservative political commentator Miguel Herrero de Minon: “El Prado is a symbol of art and culture even for people who never go. At the same time, it has been maltreated; it lacks means. There is an awareness that it should be better treated, but no consensus on how to do it.”

The sagging dowager is less glitzy than the new Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection and the Reina Sofia Art Center with which it forms a downtown art triangle. But El Prado is daunting to those who seek to change it.

As a street, Paseo del Prado is pretty, but it is also a main traffic artery through central Madrid. At the museum itself, Villanueva’s signature facade and the two sides are considered sacrosanct, untouchable.

So any visible structural changes can be made only at the back of the building. And even that possibility has required long and delicate negotiations.

Culture Ministry proposals, approved by the Cortes, or Parliament, earlier this year, would effectively double the museum’s space at a cost of about $150 million by linking the Villanueva palace to three sites behind it--probably by underground passage.

One is the existing gallery of 19th-Century art in the Cason del Buen Retiro, a former royal ballroom that is already a disconnected part of the museum.

The second is a building across the street that houses the Army Museum. The army has accepted an offer from the city of Madrid to relocate its treasures to an old barracks.

The third piece of the Prado puzzle will incorporate the cloisters of neighboring San Jeronimo church, which were damaged during the Napoleonic Wars in the 19th Century and never repaired.

The official story is that modernizing the Prado is so important that it transcends partisan politics. Maybe, but it so happens that the Culture Ministry, which runs the Prado, is an arm of the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party national government, while the Madrid city government is conservative.

In addition, not everybody is convinced that it is worthwhile to spend a lot of money to expand the museum. The Prado, critic Pedro Miguel Lamet says, is less important to Spaniards than civic fiestas, the bulls, the world of bars and soccer.

“Madrilenos don’t go to El Prado. If I was minister of culture I’d spend the money raising the quality of television,” said Lamet, a Jesuit priest and columnist for the newspaper Diario 16.

A competition to design an expanded Prado was announced in February on the basis of a 22-page briefing paper and technical documents. Architects from around the world are now mulling specifications, but renewal is still a long way off.

Luzon, whose academic specialty is exploring links between myth and history in the Bronze Age Mediterranean, is the Prado’s fourth director in as many years. One left over his opposition to the Persian Gulf War, in which Spain played a minor role. Another left after he allowed advertisements for chairs to be photographed in Prado galleries. The third was claimed by the leaky roof.

Luzon himself probably will have returned to archeology before the first spade of earth is turned. Even so, he said he is confident that the Prado “will be whatever the next century demands it to be.”

“Museums are institutions that evolve in the context of their times. They adapt to political and ideological situations,” he said.

Today, the Prado has 450 employees; in 1904 it had nine workers. Back then, Luzon said, a few highly educated people dropped by, often on Sunday mornings en route to somewhere else: One composer recounting his Sunday wrote to a mistress that at the Prado the Raphael was as sublime as ever, but the bulls, alas, had degenerated at the nearby Plaza de Toros.

“For the first time, we are now receiving a society that has had access to culture,” Luzon said. “So we will build a new museum.”