Museo Nacional de Arte

The Museo Nacional de Arte, known to everyone as MUNAL, is Mexico's national collection of Mexican art from the mid-16th century to the middle of the 20th. It stands at Tacuba 8 in the Centro Histórico, a few steps east of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, facing the small Plaza Manuel Tolsá. The plaza is ruled by El Caballito, Manuel Tolsá's bronze equestrian statue of Charles IV of Spain, cast in 1804 and moved here in 1979 after a long wander around the city; a plaque explains it was kept for its artistic value rather than out of respect for the king.

The building was never meant to be a museum. In the early 20th century the Porfirio Díaz government had the Italian architect Silvio Contri design a palace for the Ministry of Communications and Public Works, a show of the country's modern ambitions. It is eclectic in style, mostly neoclassical and Renaissance in feel, with ironwork, lamps, glass and fittings made by the Coppedé family workshop in Florence. Two spaces are the showpieces: the Salón de Recepciones upstairs, glittering with gilding, crystal and allegorical ceiling paintings, where Díaz liked to receive foreign envoys, and the Patio de los Leones with its sweeping semicircular staircase. The palace later held the national archive, and in 1982 it became the Museo Nacional de Arte, which reopened in 2000 after a major restoration.

The collection began with works transferred from other fine-arts museums and now numbers close to 9,000 pieces, including some 290 viceregal paintings that arrived in 2000. The galleries run roughly in order: colonial painting by artists such as Juan Correa, Cristóbal de Villalpando and Miguel Cabrera; the Academy of San Carlos and 19th-century painters including the great landscapist José María Velasco; and 20th-century work by Saturnino Herrán, Dr. Atl, María Izquierdo, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Orozco and Siqueiros. Temporary exhibitions fill other rooms, and the reception hall and patio host concerts and talks. Allow time for the building itself as much as for the paintings, and pair it with the Palacio Postal across the street.