Christine Seidel appointed new Head of Flemish Painting and Northern Schools

Before joining the Prado, she served as Associate Curator of Renaissance Painting at the National Gallery in London.

MADRID.— The Museo del Prado has appointed Christine Seidel as its new Head of Flemish Painting and the Northern Schools, placing a specialist in late medieval and Renaissance Northern European art in charge of one of the museum’s most important areas of study and conservation.

Seidel succeeds longtime Prado curator Alejandro Vergara, who is moving into a newly focused role as Head of Academic Content for Canal Prado, the museum’s audiovisual platform.

A scholar of Northern European art from the 14th through the 16th centuries, Seidel joins the Prado from the National Gallery in London, where she served as Associate Curator of Renaissance Painting. She previously worked at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart as curator of paintings before 1800.

Her arrival comes at a particularly visible moment. Seidel is curating the Prado’s upcoming exhibition devoted to Hans Baldung Grien, which opens November 24, 2026, and runs through March 7, 2027.

The exhibition will take its starting point from two late works by Baldung in the Prado’s collection, The Ages and Death and Harmony (The Three Graces?), both dated to around 1541–44. From there, the show will examine Baldung’s distinctive pictorial world, his relationship with Albrecht Dürer and his place within the wider development of German Renaissance painting.

Seidel is not new to the Prado. In 2018, she received the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Fellowship, during which she studied the work of Marinus van Reymerswale, including five paintings by the artist in the museum’s holdings.

That research later contributed to Marinus: Painter of Reymerswale, an exhibition curated by Seidel and presented at the Prado in 2021.

Seidel holds a PhD in Art History from the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research has focused on Flemish, Netherlandish and German painting from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as workshop practice, collecting, artistic exchange and the movement of artists and artworks across Europe.

She has also held fellowships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and with the painting and sculpture collections of the Berlin State Museums.

In her new position, Seidel will oversee the study, conservation, cataloguing and dissemination of the Prado’s collection of Flemish painting and works from the Northern schools, within the museum’s Deputy Directorate of Conservation and Research.

The appointment also marks a new phase for Alejandro Vergara, who has been a curator at the Prado since 1999 and has overseen these collections for much of his career at the museum.

Vergara will now head the academic content of Canal Prado, with particular attention to Thinking the Prado, the museum’s long-form audiovisual conversation series.

Launched in March 2026, Canal Prado brings together interviews, lectures, thematic series and other digital programming related to the museum’s collections and to broader questions in art history.

Thinking the Prado, which Vergara helped create and presents, is built largely around extended conversations with scholars, writers and cultural figures. Previous guests have included Salman Rushdie and historian Robin Lane Fox.

In his new role, Vergara will shape the academic direction and thematic priorities of the series while also advising the museum’s communications department on art-historical content.

The dual appointments give the Prado both a new specialist voice in its Northern European collection and a more defined academic structure for its expanding digital programming.