ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the dynamics of the attendance at the Prado in the last third of the nineteenth century when it became known as a National Museum of Painting and Sculpture. The transitional status from royal museum to national museum, which the Prado enjoyed in the latter part of the nineteenth century, makes it a particularly useful site for understanding how the negotiation of taste, morals and middle-class identity is performed as part of a process of nationalization. The chapter looks at nationalization as a process in which the audience's engagement with this institution was equally if not more important than the acts of legislation accompanying its official takeover by the state. Labanyi has argued that discussions about art spectatorship in Spain were part of a more general debate about the nature of sovereignty which marked Spain's contested nation-making. The chapter discusses how middle-class museum spectatorship was negotiated with other forms of leisure, such as bullfights, theatres and musical performances.
