Juxtaposing History With the Fantastic

King Carlos, however, died in 1788, leaving the project in a state of paralysis that only ended when his grandson, King Ferdinand VII, decided that the museum should instead display the royal collection of paintings and sculptures. It was inaugurated in 1819.

This chapter in Spanish history returns in a new exhibition at the Prado, “Natural Histories,” which is currently on view through late April. It includes 22 natural history objects, ranging from animal skeletons to chunks of meteorites, selected by Miguel Ángel Blanco, a Spanish artist, who has placed them throughout the museum near famous paintings that share a similar theme.

For instance, a stuffed bull stands in front of “The Rape of Europa,” a painting by Rubens that features Zeus as a white bull. Medical flasks are lined up before “Witches’ Sabbath,” one of Goya’s celebrated series of Black Paintings in which the artist represented Satan chairing a gathering of witches. The flasks contain a coiled mamba snake, a salamander, as well as one with toads — all animals connected to witchcraft.

Mr. Blanco said he selected them so that “the amber-colored ethanol in which the reptiles are preserved could in itself be seen as the chromatic distillation of Goya’s Black Paintings.” Next to the flasks, there is also a yellow sulphur rock, because “when the devil walked past, people said that he left a smell of sulphur,” Mr. Blanco explained.

“I didn’t want the visitor just to follow a conventional and easy exhibition route but also to be perhaps surprised by an individual piece, suddenly spotting something that nobody would normally expect in a place like the Prado,” Mr. Blanco said.

A snake skeleton lies next to a painting of Eve grasping the apple by Dürer. Near a Roman statue of Venus, Mr. Blanco hung a dolphin skeleton. “The dolphin’s marble-like bones are just like the ivory-toned marble of the sculptures,” he said. “We’re sailing to the beaches of Cyprus, where Venus was born, and I’ve got the feeling that the sea could burst through these windows and inundate this whole room at any moment.”

Mr. Blanco, 55, has spent most of his career painting and creating art installations closely linked to his study of the Madrid region’s fauna and flora, particularly that of the Guadarrama mountain range, where he lived and worked for several years. For the Prado show, he selected most of his objects from the National Museum of Natural Sciences, but also from the collections of the royal botanical gardens and the museum of pharmacy — places that most tourists and even local residents rarely visit.

“I’m a contemporary artist rather than a historian, but I’m amazed by how little appreciation there is for all that has been collected and gathered in the past in this city,” Mr. Blanco said. “At a time of austerity, we can do great exhibitions without spending that much money and just by using better what we already have at hand.”

The project was financed by Madrid’s regional government. Miguel Zugaza, the director of the Prado, said his museum was looking to work with contemporary artists. One of the strengths of Mr. Blanco’s exhibition, Mr. Zugaza said, is that “each piece is really telling a special story of its own, without requiring anybody to view the show in its entirety.”

The bull that stands before the Rubens painting is hard to miss, but most of Mr. Blanco’s selections are smaller and more subtle, including some fossilized rocks and plant extracts. They are also sometimes tucked into remote parts of the sprawling Madrid museum, including an upstairs room that mostly contains tapestry designs by Goya and in which Mr. Blanco placed the skeleton of an anteater below a painting featuring the actual animal, painted by a follower of Mengs.

“It’s important that such an artist is given a chance to show us his interpretation of the great paintings of the past,” said José Guirao Cabrera, the director of La Casa Encendida, a Madrid arts center, who attended the opening of the exhibition. “Nothing in a museum should be completely untouchable and static.”