A Total Solar Eclipse Is Coming to Spain. This Madrid Museum Is Celebrating With a Digital Artwork Illuminating Its Paintings ‘In the Light of the Eclipse’
A new animation from The Prado, called “El Prado a la luz del eclipse,” uses A.I. to imagine masterpieces by Goya and Velázquez as if their scenes occurred during a total solar eclipse
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Beginning this week, and for the next 17 months, the Iberian Peninsula is set to become a world capital of astronomical phenomena. Three solar eclipses—including two total solar eclipses—will pass through the region between August 2026 and January 2028.
The first, a total solar eclipse this Wednesday evening, has tourists flocking to Spain, where such an event hasn’t happened in more than a century. Experts anticipate a dramatic scene when the moon passes between Earth and the sun, darkening the Spanish sky in totality for less than two minutes.
“You can feel the totality,” Pedro García Lario, an astronomer at the European Space Agency, tells Vogue’s Julia Eskins. “The temperature drops by a few degrees, there’s a cool breeze, and the birds stop singing for just a few moments before everything goes back to normal again. It’s not unusual for people to get goosebumps or start crying.”
One of Madrid’s museums is joining in on the eclipse commemoration. Museo Nacional del Prado, also known as The Prado, has unveiled a new audiovisual work that reimagines some of its most famous paintings as though their scenes occurred in the dimming light of a solar eclipse.
Presented as a one-minute video soundtracked by “Summer” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, nearly a dozen paintings have been animated to showcase how different shadows and lighting affect their ambience and color.
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The art piece begins with a cloak of darkness sweeping across Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), which depict several characters, including the painter himself, in the palace of the kings of Spain. “The figures inhabit a space that is modeled not just through the laws of scientific perspective but also through aerial perspective,” says a museum statement about the painting. “In the definition of this space the multiplication of the light sources plays an important role.”
Later in the video, titled El Prado a la luz del eclipse, a vivid sunbeam reflects off the titular green parasol in Francisco Goya’s El Quitasol (1777), adding further consideration to what the museum in a statement describes as the artist’s “mastery at painting light and shadows.” Another Goya painting animated in the video, La pradera de San Isidro (1788), which shows hundreds of people gathered along the banks of Madrid’s River Manzanares, perhaps foreshadows the large crowds that will bear witness to the celestial event.
The video was made by a studio called AMB Piensa using a combination of artificial intelligence and more traditional graphics animation. It is the latest in a centuries-old tradition of creating art in conversation with eclipses.
Did you know? Art meets science
Artists have played a key role in recording solar eclipses. Howard Russell Butler, a 20th-century painter known for his portraits, was tasked by the Naval Observatory to immortalize on canvas the 1918 solar eclipse in Oregon. “I generally asked for ten sittings of two hours each,” he later wrote, Smithsonian magazine’s Elissaveta M. Brandon reported in 2024. “But all the time they would allow me on this occasion was 112 1/10 seconds.”There is a rich history of the celestial event appearing in Christian iconographic artworks, in part because some interpretations of the Bible tied the crucifixion of Jesus to some kind of eclipse event. But as a 2016 article in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A explores, this gradually changed throughout the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, which saw the production of an increasing number of eclipse-related pieces celebrating “both belief and rational appreciation.”
“There are fewer binary choices being made by artists, between a purely religious response and scientific one, than one might anticipate,” Ian Blatchford, director and chief executive of the Science Museum Group, wrote.
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