Tuesday, October 13, 2015 Center of the Art Universe, the Prado

Good morning, world! We are safe and sound and snug in our new Airbnb palace in Madrid. What a difference a good night’s sleep can make! During the night, I realize that the bed sits delightfully low to the ground.  By myself, using Tinky, I can walk over to the bathroom. Parking Tinky at the miniscule bathroom door and holding the walls, I can back up to the toilet. Excepting the elevator, I feel that this place was designed for me!

Our Airbnb flat is in Lavapiés, the Jewish neighborhood before the 1492 expulsion. Wikipedia posits that the name Lavapiés, or wash the feet, comes from washing your feet in a fountain before entering the temple. Naturally, following the reconquista, a cathedral replaced the synagogue. All history aside, our flat sits smack dab in the center of museum-land and quite close to the all-important train station, Puerta de Atocha. We can easily walk to most sites and needn’t use the Metro. Rick Steves calls this neighborhood “edgy”. Greatly appreciating the absence of other tourists, we see no problems whatsoever. I rate a neighborhood by whether or not older women venture out and walk about by themselves in the evening. Lavapiés passes; no one harasses anyone.

Now I have only to convince the boys that the glory of our central location surpasses the hassle of the elevator. “We won’t even need the Metro,” I proclaim. They require little convincing. Putting their shaggy animal heads together, they devise a scheme whereby they set me on Tinky the walker, push the walker into the teensy-weensy lift and send me up or downstairs. The boys arrive shortly thereafter, pull Tinky and me out of the ascensor. I wait as they fold up Bird and send her along in a separate trip. Once Bird and I reunite, the boys reassemble Bird, set me on her and then send Tinky back. Thus, every elevator ride requires three trips, but does bring us success. 

But not so fast or perhaps too fast! The floor of the foyer slopes toward the street. I learn to always set my brakes lest I, in whatever wheeled contrivance I sit, begin to drift toward the outer doors, accelerating as I go.

Today we visit the Prado, the last major European museum remaining on my bucket list. Following the Prado , I will have visited all locations/museums listed in Rick Steves’ Mona Winks, a major lifetime accomplishment. (I have since added the Hermitage to the bucket list.)

Bloodroot targets the Prado via GPS.  Following his iPhone directions, we walk up and down hills near the flat. Bloodroot pushes me with the exuberance of youth, while locals roll their eyes, laughing at our difficult, hilly path.

Reaching the museum, we roll up to the ticket counter. The clerk insists that I prove I’m disabled. I brandish my Social Security disability award letter. Thus far in our adventure, no one in authority has requested proof of incapacity, allowing Bird’s mute presence to speak for us. Bird’s shyness countenances verbalization only with the family. The clerk then demands my passport as after all I may be faking that I’m crippled in order to save €5. Think about it! The museum must defend itself against hordes of Norteamericano tourists rushing in, renting wheelchairs to fake cripdom, all in order to save €5. That the wheelchair rental would cost €20 is completely irrelevant. Perhaps the Prado has a motto: No one gets a reduced rate! They’re all fakers! In Denver, I purchased two museum tickets online but forgot about Bloodroot. We buy his ticket and also a €6 Prado Guidebook.

Bloodroot wants to see every single thing in the Prado. He even moves more slowly than we do, a feat I previously considered impossible. Is God laughing when your children grow up to be more you than you? I hope that someone finds amusement in our predicament. The Prado, a humongous, intimidating museum, has two floors. Sighing, we begin with the lower level.

The first room contains a wonderful self-portrait of Dürer as a young man, the German boy dressing like an Italian princeling. Spanish gentry bought the painting from England’s Charles I’s estate. Nearby, we find Durer’s depiction of Eve and Adam with very pretty, happy bodies, oblivious to or despite their impending fate. Make hay while the sun shines, eh?

The Prado Guidebook turns out to be a fantastic investment, incredibly useful as we traverse the museum. Reading the book later at home makes me chuckle. The authors are incredibly stuck on themselves and their museum, but it is the Prado, after all. They constantly compare themselves to the Louvre, considering themselves far superior to the Louvre as the Prado’s collections originated as gifts from the Spanish royal family whereas the Louvre began when patriots expropriated art during the Revolution.

On the Prado’s first floor, we wander, enthralled, through the most amazing display of Renaissance paintings known. We enter a room bedecked with all sorts of Bosches and Bruegels. Once inside, we join the line and see Bosch’s tryptic Garden of Earthly Delights. The painting begins on the left side with the Garden of Eden then progresses through many earthly sins that look like a lot of fun, before people’s eventual fates in heaven or hell─mostly hell. Intended as a lesson on the consequences of ignoring Church dogma, the painting’s message is lost on us as we can’t decipher the sermonizing (which we’d probably reject anyway.)  We gawk at the eroticism of both the sins and their punishments, trying to untangle the progression from one to the other.

A few feet away, we find a really cool table showing the seven deadly sins, also by Bosch. As heathens, we can’t decipher which sin is which. Fortunately we have the Prado Guidebook which explains the allegory behind each sin.

Keith, a big Bruegel fan, pays homage to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death, where ─ much the same as Bosch ─ myriad people run about on a very busy canvas, dying in various gross ways. An army of skeletons approaches from the canvas’ east. Bruegel’s next work, The Wine of St. Martin’s Day, also has lots of people running amuck, but this time drunk and happy. All of these works provide us with a glimpse into the very strange world of the 1500s.

Bloodroot and I believe we find the painting gracing the cover of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. With further research, we learn that Pinker used the Rembrandt painting called The Sacrifice of Isaac for his cover art. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg owns this painting. Whoops!

Bloodroot’s favorite, Fra Angelico, has one large painting in the Prado, portraying the life of the Virgin Mary. I wonder: What is her last name? Did she keep her real name? What is Jesus’ last name? Enough woolgathering!

Bloodroot enjoys the medieval religious art that I find odd. He likes the way people took gold, the most precious thing known, and plastered it all over the paintings. I see so much gold that I believe artists cut photos of people out of magazines and pasted them atop gold backgrounds. Bloodroot also gazes lovingly on some frescoes from around the year 1000 that the Prado preserved by pulling them out of some old church facing vandalism. The frescos feature very white people with big eyes, recognizably like us, Europeans.

Unfortunately Renaissance art involves a lot of Jesus art. We see numerous Marys and Jesuses, all created by very prominent Renaissance artists, but you can only see so many Jesuses without screaming, leading to your being forcibly medicated and sedated. We also see lots of pagan mythological allegories. I have always liked these due to the absence of Jesus. Bloodroot abhors them, finding them worse than the Christian art.

Keith and Bloodroot both love the Goya paintings. We begin with Goya’s self-portrait showing a brooding, intense, thoughtful man, hungry for life. We quickly scan his royal portraits and religious paintings. We slow down, enjoying his numerous depictions of everyday life around 1800. In the 1820s, Goya, old and going deaf from syphilis, descended into his dark period, using fewer and fewer colors, painting witches, duels, Saturn devouring his young and other dark subjects. Old, sick, and facing mortality, anguish rolls off of him in a surrealistic orgy onto the canvas. Could Goya simply have been ill with neurosyphilis, the fate of so many before antibiotics brought effective treatment of this incredibly common disease? Of course! Whatever the impetus, Goya painted his nightmares and feelings, foreshadowing the Surrealism movement by a century, perhaps inventing it. The Prado has over 150 Goya paintings.

Next, we find a room with an Alanso Cano painting of Mary projectile-lactating into St. Bernard’s mouth. Bernard, thoroughly obsessed with the Queen of Heaven, reforms the Cistercian order. Mary’s milk appears often throughout the museum, presented as a panacea for humanity’s sufferings. I’m surprised that the Holy Virgin lactated. No formula in the Roman Empire, eh? In another canvas, Jesus squirts Mary’s milk onto sinners in purgatory to soothe them in their time of need. Her milk cools the flames tormenting them. Jesus has a mischievous grin on his face as he delights in playing with his mom’s boobs, squirting her milk here and there. I am not making this up.

We discover another canvas showing Cleopatra with the asp about to bite her boob. Some artists picture their invented history in the most prurient terms possible.

The Prado prides itself on its extensive Spanish collection. Keith agrees, enjoying the Spanish stuff on the bottom floor, including portraits, landscapes and Goya.

But I am damning the place with faint praise. This may be the finest art museum we’ve seen. Keith just made a choking noise so perhaps he disagrees. He still calls the museum the Prada, no matter how many times I mention that Prada is an expensive shoe store and Prado a painting museum in Madrid.

Over the course of four or five hours, we work very, very hard and see the entire bottom floor. Pretty spaced by now, we think about going outside to buy something for lunch but realize we won’t be allowed back in. Herded down to the museum cafeteria, we find a place fairly reminiscent of Bosch’s depictions of hell. Many museums now pride themselves on their in-house restaurants. The Catalan Art Museum comes to mind, where we enjoyed our finest meal in Barcelona.  I’m sorry to report that the Prado bucks this trend.

In the greasy cafeteria, we buy some amazingly overpriced quasi-food ─ a bit of obscenely salty chicken, a beet salad, and what might at one time have been vegetables. €28 for the worst food we’ve had on the entire trip! Rick Steves describes the cafeteria food as adequate. Bah! Perhaps we have outgrown him.  

No longer starving, we leave a good bit of the food on the trays, running off to tackle the top floor the museum.

We find the ascensor which Keith logically calls the ascender, and rise to the second floor somewhat like Mary being sucked into heaven. The second floor features Velasquez’ Las Meninas, a truly amazing work. You peek inside Philip IV’s family, watching the Princess Marguerite surrounded by her maids, dwarves and tutors. Her parents, reflected in the mirror nearby, evince pardonable pride in their pretty little girl. (Consider the endless inbreeding making it amazing they produced any living progeny.) I sigh, thinking of her brief and tragic life. Imagine yourself engaged while still in your cradle, a marriage pawn, the fate of an infanta. I find myself unduly attracted to her, wanting to defend and protect her because she so resembles me as a child, towheaded with piercing brown eyes. But does the portrait lie? Velasquez worked for Philip IV, painting pretty marriage portraits to send to Marguerite’s future husband in Austria. Did she have the Habsburg genetic underbite? Not in this portrait. In real life, she wed her uncle, twelve years her senior, endured six pregnancies from the age of 15 to 21 and then died.

I like Velasquez’ paintings of historical personages (primarily royalty) but then I love history. The boys, lacking my enchantment, pick up the pace. Forever trapped in Bird, I meekly go where they take me. (They disagree, insisting that I never have been or will be meek, or a member of the Communist Party.)

The rest of the second floor obsesses on masters painting nearly identical portraits of long-dead, unknown Spaniards.  Created in the 1500s and 1600s, cloaked head to foot in black with a white Elizabethan starched ruffle collar, I wonder how these people even sat. Did they remove their collars to move? I try to picture them dancing or fencing or doing anything other than standing there staring at me. Although well done, we find the portraits exceedingly boring as we don’t know anything about any of these people. The paintings also go on forever.

Having seen all the art we can take for one day, we make to leave, naturally first seeking the gift shop. Keith wants to shop in a Prada at the Prado. He would ignore the shoes, concerned that any high heels would harm his big bear claws, hampering skiing.  He wants a Prada purse. He would carry a book in his purse, which he could pull out and read anywhere, just like his son. Gauntlet thrown, the boys begin a manliness competition. I enter the fray, suggesting dinner. My fellow animals accept the food proposal with alacrity.

We think about going to Charles III’s botanical garden neighboring the Prado but find it closed. And we’re hungry. We head for home and begin gathering food for dinner. Since unlike a swanky hotel/resort part of town, people actually live in Lavapiés, we find numerous meat purveyors, fruit and vegetable stands, wine shops, beer stores and ─ for things that fall into none of the above ─ a Carrefour. (I consider Carrefour the Walmart of Europe; Bear says no, the Safeway.) After procuring some chicken and vegetables we roll home. The boys create a delicious meal. This Airbnb has a dishwasher, delighting the boys, although they never use it. They just like to watch.