Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando

Stand on the pavement of Calle de Alcalá for a moment and listen. Buses grind uphill, delivery scooters weave past, and the voices from Puerta del Sol drift up the street. Then look at the plain stone facade in front of you. It is calm and almost severe, with tall windows in neat rows. Behind those walls is one of the oldest art institutions in Spain, and a collection that many visitors to Madrid walk straight past.

This is the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. It is a school, a learned society and a museum all at once. The name honours King Ferdinand the Sixth, who formally founded the academy in 1752. The word "San Fernando" refers to Saint Ferdinand, a medieval king of Castile and the patron saint of the reigning monarch. Work to create the academy had started some years earlier, under his father, Philip the Fifth.

The idea came from the European Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century movement that put its faith in reason, education and public institutions. Paris and Rome already had academies that trained artists and set standards of taste. Spain wanted the same. Here, young painters, sculptors and architects would study drawing, anatomy and the art of the ancient world. The academy would also judge new public buildings and guide the look of the kingdom.

Now look again at the facade, because it hides a story. This building began life in the early eighteenth century as a private palace for Juan de Goyeneche, a wealthy financier. Its architect was José Benito de Churriguera. His family gave its name to the Churrigueresque style, a Spanish late Baroque that covered surfaces with twisting columns, scrolls and carved foliage. The palace once looked far more theatrical than it does today.

When the academy acquired the palace in the 1770s, the new owners found that ornament embarrassing. To them, it stood for exactly the excess they wanted to correct. The architect Diego de Villanueva remodelled the front in a sober neoclassical style, and much of the Baroque decoration disappeared. So the facade in front of you is a kind of argument in stone. An academy of good taste literally shaved the old style off its own house.

Here is a detail that many visitors miss. For a time, the building also held the royal natural history collection. Art and science shared the same roof, under the patronage of King Charles the Third. An inscription on the facade records this union of nature and art for the public good. It is a small reminder of how the Enlightenment saw knowledge — as one connected whole, open to everyone.

Inside, the atmosphere changes. The traffic noise fades, and the rooms feel quiet, a little old-fashioned, and pleasantly unhurried. Wooden floors creak in places. The galleries climb over several floors, and they are rarely crowded. After the long queues at the Prado, this calm is part of the pleasure. You can stand close to a painting and stay as long as you like.

The name that holds this place together is Francisco de Goya. He was a member of the academy, and he later directed its teaching of painting. The museum keeps a remarkable group of his works. Among them are the small, dark scenes often called The Burial of the Sardine and The Madhouse. Look for the crowds, the masks, the strange half-lit faces. They show Goya at his most personal and unsettling.

The second surprise is in the same building. The National Chalcography, a collection devoted to engraving and printmaking, is part of the academy. It keeps original copper plates that Goya used for his famous print series, including Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War. These are the actual metal sheets he worked with his tools. Standing near them, you are very close to the hand of the artist himself.

Goya is not alone here. The collection includes paintings by Zurbarán, whose white-robed friars seem to glow against dark backgrounds. There are works by Murillo, Ribera and Rubens. One of the most unexpected pieces is Spring by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Italian painter who built human faces out of flowers, fruit and leaves. Look closely, and the cheek turns into a rose. Children and adults usually react the same way — with a laugh.

The academy also has a famous list of students who did not fit in. A young Pablo Picasso enrolled here in the late nineteenth century and soon stopped attending classes. Instead, he spent his time copying the old masters at the Prado. Decades later, Salvador Dalí studied here too, and he was eventually expelled. Both stories tell you something real. Academies teach the rules, and some of their most famous pupils became famous by breaking them.

The academy is still a living institution. Its members are artists, architects, composers and scholars, and it still holds sessions, publishes research and organises exhibitions. So the building is not only a museum of the past. It is a meeting place where people still argue about what good art should be. In that sense, the debate that stripped the Baroque facade has never really ended.

When you step back out onto Calle de Alcalá, take a moment before you join the flow of people. Look at the facade once more and imagine the curling Baroque carvings that once covered it. Then turn toward Puerta del Sol, or up toward the grand buildings near Gran Vía. Madrid is full of layers like this. The quiet rooms behind you hold Goya's dark crowds and Arcimboldo's flower face — just a few steps from the noise of the street.