Madrid: The Prado, and Some Inept Art Thoughts

Our last day in Spain had finally arrived. On the agenda: the Prado, the Reina Sofia, and a flamenco dinner. It was, as anticipated, hot as hell.



The Prado is, as I am sure you're aware, Spain's most majestic and celebrated art museum. Opened in 1819, it was nationalized under Isabella II in 1868, and was first enlarged in 1918. The Prado houses 1,300 paintings, and despite it's unimpressive facade, is truly immense on the inside: corridors leading into corridors, galleries one after another. It is justly considered one of the world's great art museums, and is absolutely a must when visiting Spain. (The air conditioning, incidentally, is exceptional.)



Knowledge of the Prado was lodged away inside my memory a long time ago, and only resurfeced when I arrived in Spain: I recalled reading an excellent book on Velazquez in 5th grade, remembered the contented smirk of the dog in his uberfamous Las Meninas, his willingness to accurately depict the inbred ugliness of the Spanish royal family of his time. I was looking forward to seeing his work.




Fra Angelico was a painter of the early Italian Renaissance. You have almost certainly seen his Anunciation projetcted onto a dusty classroom wall at some juncture in your school career. There are hordes of anunciation depictions here at the Prado, but this one is worthy of looking at: the slender and delicate figures, the worried and evocative expression on Mary's face, the gently supernatural color palette. They are indicative of the artistic revolution that would follow soon after Fra Angelico's masterpiece. There are in fact several copies of this painting scattered about - one is at St. Mark's Convent.



Goya's Nude Maja is helpfully described with its sister piece, portraying a clothed Maja. How convenient for different social occasions. ("Goddamit, Juanita, you forgot to switch out the paintings! And my mother law will be over in FIVE MINUTES!" )


The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus Bosch What can I say? I have this clear memory of being in first grade and leafing through a particularly gruesome book on the Black Plague in my school's library. To illustrate the concept, one of Bosch's surreal, horrifying, and incredibly imaginative was used, reproduced in living and virulent color. I recall falling in love - all those hideous unnatural monsters, lurching skeletons, innumerable tortures, a sort of sense of some great machine of life. When I came upon the Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado, it was rather like coming upon an old friend. "Oh, I remember you!" I said to myself. Bosch was from the Netherlands, born in 1453. His life and his training is a mystery - he seems to appear as some totally bizarre curiosity upon the art world, surrealism entirely earlier then it had any right to be. The exact meaning of his art is argued about endlessly in the halls of art history, but it is generally agreed he depicted religious allegory - whether his opinions on religion were heretical or not is unknown. Certainly they provide a more compelling depiction of the dangers of sin and the innumerable grotesque doings of mankind then any other religious art I've seen - or perhaps they just resonate with me more. Bosch's paintings at the Prado are located inside a delightful room devoted to grotesque and horrifying paintings of the era, many directly influenced by Bosch's little worlds of horror.

I bought a puzzle of the painting at the gift shop and am still working on it. I regularly find single pieces portraying dangling limbs, toothy sea creatures, and contorted faces. The puzzle, too, is making my day better.


Luis Melendez, Still Life with Salmon and Lemon, 1772

I am a food writer, and I was most pleased with the excellent food paintings scattered throughout the gallery. They are works of unabashed realism, that indicate the pure pleasure of elemental and natural ingredients. They are naturalist works operating under the guise of cuisine. Spanish still lifes in this guise are called bodegón (after, presumably, the word bodega, which indicates a small grocery store). They are defined by intensely rendered and luminous natural ingredients superimposed against a dark background. In Spain, the paintings took on a stark and simple nature - in accordance with the Spanish aesthetic, and in direct juxtaposition to the super-luxe food paintings of the Low Countries.Within the Prado, works by Juan Sánchez Cotán and Luis Egidio Meléndez are exemplarily of the style. I remain somewhat shocked that foodies haven't seize upon these classic painters as indicators of the rich pedigree of food obsession in the Western world. I would like to have posters of these to hang in my kitchen to make me feel cosmopolitan.

The Prado featured the amazing innovation of vending machines for books. You drop a euro into the machine and a lovely little book with full color pictures pops out, explaining the paintings you are looking at in the respective room. I collected about six of them. They are lovely souvenirs.

We spent about three hours in the Prado, which allowed the outside world to get just a little bit hotter in the process. We set out into the streets nearby to find somewhere to eat, which we did: a little workingman's place, Bistro Calvin. The food was good, if not memorable, and the ambience was exactly what one might experience daily as a Madrid businessmen: congenial waiters, cheap and immense sandwiches, and a well-stocked bar.


Roast chicken with fried potatoes. Simple stuff, but this was pretty tasty, with plenty of savory chicken fat dripping into the potatoes. It's the simple Spanish cuisine that everyone gets by on, not that molecular stuff - roast chicken makes the world go round'.


You may have guessed that this is paella. We spent our time in Northern Spain, and the paella heartland is Southern Spain - it will be on the menu in some Northern enclaves but it will inevitably be bastardized and a little wrong. For these reasons, we had not had a single bit of paella during our entire time in Spain, until we ate here. I am no paella judger (having had it only a few times) but this tasted very nice: the classic combo of saffron scented rice, plenty of assorted sea creatures, chicken, and chorizo, supplemented with a squirt of lemon. So I maybe need to go to Valencia.

We decided to head to the Reina Sofia next. Which will, I suspect, require another blog post.