Madrid: art and more art

I’m home now. I guess I will do a retrospective post on my entire three-month journey, but first I should share a little about my five nights in Madrid.

Arrival in Madrid

I already wrote about how my flight from Granada to Madrid got canceled and I ended up taking the train. I would have arrived at 11:30. But the train didn’t arrive until 3pm. Not a terrible problem, but it did mean I would be a bit rushed to get to the opera that evening.

I didn’t mention that the ride I had booked with Welcome Pickups from the train station to my Airbnb never showed up. I ended up walking from the train station, which worked out okay. It was just about 20 minutes. And Welcome Pickups, which I have used frequently with excellent reliability until this one time, were very responsive, giving me a full refund and a voucher for a future ride.

Opera

I love going to the opera in different cities, and Madrid offered what turned out to be a superb venue and a brilliant performance of The Tale of Tsar Saltan by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. I was not at all familiar with this opera, but I ended up enjoying both the music and the storytelling. And the production and singing were stellar.

The famous orcestral piece, “Flight of the Bumblebee,” comes from this opera. I never knew that the piece came from an opera at all. One of the characters in the opera, the Tsar’s son, transforms himself into a bumblebee so he can eavesdrop on the Tsar and others, and this is the music that accompanies his buzzing about.

The production included an interesting dramatic choice that is impossible to describe without providing a complete synopsis. (Of course, if you want a complete synopsis, you’re welcome to read it.) In a nutshell, they decided to make the Tsar’s son autistic. I appreciate this sort of directorial choice, but it seemed inconsistent with the character’s behavior, and it turned the ending from joyous (with music to match) to tragic (with the same joyous music that didn’t fit).

This choice, though, allowed for some spectacularly inventive costuming. The entire first act is played as the mother telling a story to her autistic son, and casting it as a fairy tale so he will understand.

Anyway, I loved the opera. And the Teatro Real, Madrid’s opera house, which opened in 1850, has superb acoustics.

Prado

I love a good art museum. So a great art museum? I’ve been looking forward to visiting the Prado for years.

I booked a tour called VIP Alone in the Prado: Exclusive Early Access Museum Tour. With a small group, I got to visit the museum an hour before opening, with a superb guide who gave us some real insights about the major works in the museum.

At 10am the museum opened, and soon we were sharing the space with a lot of other people. But before that we were able to spend five or ten minutes in front of Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” and our guide helped us see so much of the detail crowded into those three panels.

Photos weren’t allowed inside the museum, but I kept track of the works we looked at and found photos online (all in the public domain). You can check them out here. I’ve included lots of analytical description from the museum’s website. 

In case you didn’t click the link and are still here, let me introduce you to two more of my favorite paintings from the collection, both by the same painter, Diego Velázquez.

Las Meninas (1656)

Even as I look at this painting now, I’m struck with how brilliant it is on so many levels. First off, it’s a group portrait, focusing on the little girl in white, who happens to be the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Teresa, the daughter of King Philip IV and his second wife (who was also his niece), Mariana of Austria. Around her are her ladies-in-waiting (the meaning of the title, “Las Meninas”).

But there is so much more going on here. First off, the man in the doorway, unseen by anyone else in the photo. He is Don José Nieto Velázquez—the queen’s chamberlain. But it is unclear if he is arriving or leaving, or if he is just standing there watching. But notice what his presence does aesthetically. It pulls our eyes toward the background, where we see a reflection in the mirror.

And that reflection is none other than the Infanta’s parents, the King and Queen. Where are they standing? They’re standing next to us, the viewers of the painting.

And there’s one other person in the painting: Velázquez himself, standing in front of a large canvas, at least as big as the painting we’re looking at. What is he painting? He seems to be looking right at us–or at the King and Queen.

Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (1630)

Apollo, at left, has just arrived at Vulcan’s forge. Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking. Vulcan is shown second from left. The other four figures have stopped working and are looking in surprise, as Apollo delivers the news that Vulcan’s wife, Venus, is being unfaithful with Mars.

This is a much earlier work of Velázquez’s, when he was just 30 years old. It’s considered to be one of his most important early works.

What strikes me about it is the composition. Velázquez depicts six partially nude figures in six distinct positions, so we can clearly see his mastery in understanding the anatomy of the male body. We can see clearly the look of surprise and shock in their faces and postures. 

Look at the fellow at the far right. He is in the middle of doing something, and yet he is frozen. 

The classical subject matter, the interest in nudes, and the frieze-style (where there is very little depth in the action) were all popular in the 1630s, and Velázquez clearly demonstrated his mastery.

Reina Sofia

After our tour of the Prado, I spent another couple of hours there, but I pushed myself because I wanted to get to the Reina Sofia that afternoon. I walked the fifteen minutes between the two museums in the pouring rain. I had an umbrella, but my pants and shoes were still soaked. So I went to the museum restaurant to have lunch and dry off.

Guernica

After lunch I headed directly to “Guernica.”

I visited Gernika back in March, and there I learned first hand about the horror of what happened there on April 26, 1937. Nazi planes, in support of Nationalist General Francisco Franco, bombed Gernika for about two hours. This was a Monday, market day, so the city was crowded with people from surrounding villages. The nearest military target, a war product factory on the town’s outskirts, went through the attack unscathed, so the attack was widely condemned as a terror bombing.

A British journalist in the area reported on the bombing. Picasso read those reports, and they inspired him to do this painting. At the time, he was under commission to create a painting for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition of 1937. He had been working on a different theme, but on May 1 he began sketching a series of preliminary drawings for Guernica. He finished the painting on June 4, 1937, and told the world a story that Franco tried to suppress.

I have to commend the museum for how this painting is displayed. Most paintings in the museum have a cable “fence” about two feet in front, preventing us from approaching too close. “Guernica” has a fence about ten feet away. And the people in the room were all standing another five feet or so back from the fence. The crowd did not interfere with the viewing of the painting. 

I stood there for ten minutes, utterly transfixed. It’s not a beautiful painting, but it is so deeply evocative. Every time I try to focus in on a detail, such as the bull, or the mother holding the dead baby, or the hand grasping a broken sword, I am quickly pulled back out to experience the painting as a whole. How much greater it is than the sum of its parts!

Other work in Reina Sofia

Photos were allowed in Reina Sofia, but I tried not to go overboard. Here are the rest of my photos from the museum. (There are just fourteen others.)

Cooking Class

I don’t cook much. But I love watching cooking shows on TV, and I love food, so I signed up for a cooking class. We made a simple pintxo, a tomato salad, croquettes, paella, and macerated strawberries for dessert. Our guide was funny and also very intimidating, and we were served various adult beverages, so the entire experience was fun, even if I didn’t learn a great deal.

The Thyssen

The third great art museum in Madrid is the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, generally known as “The Thyssen.” Unlike the Prado, which leaves off in the early 20th century and is light on Impressionism, or the Reina Sofia, which only covers the last 125 years or so, the Thyssen has an encompassing collection from the 13th century to the late 20th century. It started out as a private collection. In the early 1990s the Spanish government purchased the collection and opened this museum.

Rick Steves describes this museum as “basically minor works by major artists and major works by minor artists. (Major works by major artists are in the Prado.)” But he goes on to point out the the Prado is weak on art of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially Impressionism, and this is where the Thyssen is strong.

Stupidly, I planned not to go overboard taking photos in the Thyssen. I’d been so good in the Reina Sofia. But I ended up taking photos of about 100 works of art here. And it’s all the more stupid, since there are two excellent online tours you can take on their website:

• A narrated welcome tour through the museum
• A self-guided, interactive virtual tour, where you can view the collection room by room and up close.

My album only has my 95 very favorite works from the museum. So you have a choice: you can do your own virtual tour, or just look at my curated sampling. My album is also completely out of chronological order; I somehow failed to visit the museum correctly, so the order is a bit random. 

El Escorial

While I was on the “Backroads of Iberia” OAT tour, I chatted a lot with Laura, our Trip Leader, about my interest in history. She told me I should try to get to El Escorial while I was in Madrid. So I booked a private driver to take me. It was about an hour drive.

Philip II moved the capital to Madrid in 1561. Toledo had a strong church presence, and the archbishop had a great deal of political power. Moving the capital gave Philip more authority without the church breathing down his back, so to speak.

Philip was also a deeply devout Catholic, so when he decided to build his palace, he decided it should also be a monastery, basilica, pantheon, library, museum, university, school, and hospital. He selected a location in a wooded area about 45 kilometers northwest of Madrid, at an elevation where temperatures are relatively mild in the summertime. And he hired a Spanish architect, Juan Bautista de Toledo, who had worked in Rome on St. Peter’s Baslica. Construction began in 1563. When Toledo died in 1567, the work continued under his apprentice, Juan de Herrera. The work was completed in 1584.

Since then, almost all the Spanish monarchs have been entombed in El Escorial, but no one ever lived there other than Philip II. It has been used for all its other intended purposes, and it has been open to visitors almost from the beginning.

Art in El Escorial

Some great paintings are on display in El Escorial. Philip himself commissioned many works by some of the greatest artists of his day, included El Greco, Titian, and Velázquez.

Valle de Cuelgamuros

Though it has nothing to do with El Escorial, I visited this nearby site (at Laura’s urging) on the same daytrip.

Built between 1940 and 1958, Francisco Franco said that it was intended as a national act of atonement and reconciliation. Its original name was “Valle de los Caídos” (Valley of the Fallen), and when Franco died in 1975, he was buried here. In 2019, the government decided to move his remains to his wife’s mausoleum, outside Madrid. And in 2022 they renamed the monument “Valle de Cuelgamuros” (Valley of Hanging Walls).

The arcade you can see in the photo is the only part of the basilica that is outside the hill. The cross on top is the largest in the world. And the depth of the basilica in the cave make it the largest in the world as well. But when the Pope blessed it, he excluded the entryway, so the official size of the basilica is slightly smaller than St. Peter’s in Rome.

Going in was creepy. There was no one else there. I walked all the way through this long, cavernous tunnel, which Rick Steves says is filled with “as solumn silence and a stony chill.”

There’s a lot of controversy around this monument. Political prisoners did most of the labor, digging out 220,000 tons of granite. Thousands of victims from Spain’s Civil War were exhumed and reburied here without the knowledge or consent of their families.

I did not like this place. At all. But I’m glad I went to see it.

Madrid Walk

I had originally planned for my last day in Madrid to be another daytrip, this time to Segovia. I really did want to go there, and I’d bought a train ticket in advance. But I came to discover how utterly inconvenient a journey it would have been. The train departed from Madrid from a station far from where I was staying. And it arrived in Segovia far from the center of town. The extra time it would have taken to get to and from each train station gave me second thoughts.

So I decided to use the day to see things in Madrid that I hadn’t had a chance to see so far. So I walked along the Gran Vía, which was a chance to see some interesting architecture from the first half of the 20th century.

The Gran Vía is a broad avenue. It was slashed through the middle of the city between 1910 and 1930, the age of the rise of automobiles. Belle Époque and Art Deco edifices, which were once lavish apartment and office biuldings, line it on both sides. Many of them now house retail establishments, but they retain their elegance.

Eventually I ended up in a lovely park with impressive views and an ancient Egyptian temple.

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I think that about covers it.

In case I neglected to share any links to photo albums, here are all of them.

• Madrid (excluding museums)
• The Prado
• Reina Sofia
• The Thyssen
• El Escorial and Valle de Cuelgamuros