MADRID — Old Masters have always outnumbered Old Mistresses, especially at the Prado. The museum is chock-a-block with paintings we know from Art History 101, in which female artists seem almost nonexistent. We come to the Prado to admire El Greco’s bony saints and Goya’s strolling majas, to marvel at Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” that brilliant painting-puzzle in which the artist depicts himself with assorted members of the Spanish court, working on an enormous canvas that we cannot see, leaving us to wonder for eternity what it shows.

This year the Prado is celebrating its 200th anniversary, and the good news is that the female presence in its galleries has been winningly expanded with “A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana.” The historically revelatory show, which remains on view until Feb. 2, brings together about 60 works by two 16th-century Italian artists who were celebrated in their lifetimes but rudely forgotten after their deaths. Over the centuries, many of their paintings were lost, destroyed or reattributed to their male colleagues, and it wasn’t until the 19th century that the process of rehabilitation began.

Sofonisba, the more compelling and modern of the two, was a sensitive portraitist whose work is easy to recognize. (Both artists are known by their first names, as is true of Renaissance biggies including Leonardo and Michelangelo). She is sometimes described as the first major female painter of the Renaissance, and the faces gazing out from her work have a startling immediacy. The show opens with a series of self-portraits that emphasize the roundedness of things. She depicts herself as a wide-eyed, moon-faced young woman eager to declare her ambition as an artist. Her hair is pulled back indifferently, and her clothing is nothing special. She generally wears the same black jacket, and the same white blouse that ties at the neck. She has no use for makeup or jewelry, and there’s no grand Mona Lisa-like landscape unfurling in the distance behind her. Instead, she appears against flat, brownish, near-empty backgrounds that heighten the austere mood.