"Las Meninas" by Richard Hamilton

An extraordinary opportunity. El Prado Museum is exhibiting Las Meninas by Hamilton, a homage to Picasso, together with three Goya's prints (Velázquez's) and the very first drawing by Picasso of his own 44 variations (brought to Madrid from Barcelona's Picasso Museum). If you complete your visit going to the Villanueva building and have a look at the real one that day might stay in your memory for quite a long time.

The video the Museum has in its WEB is fantastic too. So much so that it is a pity that visitors can not watch it in the same room where the exhibition takes place.

Just one thing for architects: Richard Hamilton was a member of the Independent Group together with Alison and Peter Smithson in the 1950's, which gives hints of the pop inspiration of Brutalism in architecture. If you think about it, between Hamilton's Meninas and Picasso's there is the same sort of relation than between the Hunstanton School and Mies: in both cases, what it is at stake, is a splendid "manipulation of second hand images", the essence of Pop Art in Hamilton's opinion.

Ultra High Definition Prado Museum

The possibility of watching masterpieces by Velazquez, Goya, El Greco, Tiziano, Rembrandt, Rubens... like if we where in the studio of those artists and as close to the work as they have been is something really interesting.

The only way of understanding art is to put ourselves in the place of the artist that has create the work, to be in his shoes. Well, digital technology has just done it possible. The only thing is that the news made it impossible today to reach the museum site. Yes, digital queueing. Even technology cannot avoid the fact that there are millions of people interested in the same things at the same time.

This article in The Guardian speculates on whether it is even better than the real thing.