The Mariano Moret Collection is a private collection of Old Master prints focusing mainly on sixteenth-century engravings on metal. It is a private collection with a public mission, the main purpose of which is to promote wider knowledge of one of the lesser known artistic disciplines, providing access to works which, because of their exceptional nature and the strict conservation measures they require, are rarely exhibited in public.

  The uniqueness and importance of the works contained in the Mariano Moret Collection make it one of the most outstanding collections of Old Master prints in Spain, as it includes a large number of works of extraordinary rarity by distinguished artists who are not represented in any other Spanish collection. Its remarkable holdings of German and Flemish/Dutch Renaissance prints are only comparable with those of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, and it has thus become the benchmark collection at national level for studying the work of some of the essential artists in the history of printmaking, such as Lucas van Leyden or the Little Masters.

  The collection is structured around two core areas. The first of these is the Dutch school, centring on the figure of Lucas van Leyden and the influence exerted by this exceptional artist on the generations of printmakers that followed him. The second nucleus of the collection is devoted to German Renaissance prints, mainly the work of the Little Masters and the Nuremberg printmakers of the generation after Dürer, as well as the Hopfers of Augsburg, inventors of the technique of etching. From these two central concerns a number of subplots unfold, and tracing and interpreting them enhances the interest and attraction of the collection and enables it to develop in a more cross-sectional dimension: ornamental prints, the Weibermacht or “Power of Women”, the grotesque and the unusual, war and the representation of violence, spirituality, myth, popular subjects, love, death… iconographic curiosities and veiled messages conveyed through the stories of gods and mortals.