A week or two ago, my friend Tatiana booked a last-minute trip to Spain and asked if Brian and I could meet her in Madrid. It’s a quick, 2-hour hop from Valencia thanks to high-speed rail, so I leaped at the chance to (finally) spend a day in the capital city. Brian lived in Madrid for a year, but all I had seen of it was the airport (awful) and the metro/train stations (even worse). The figurative and literal center of Spain (though Barcelona feels more like the cultural capital), there are a lot of things I’d like to see in Madrid, from the Egyptian Temple of Debod to all of the cool, small venues that my favorite Spanish bands play instead of coming to Valencia. With Tatiana’s visit, I was able to cross one of the biggies off the list: Museo Nacional del Prado, Spain’s biggest art museum.
I knew a bit about El Prado before going. I wanted to see Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings, and thanks to Animal Crossing, I also knew that Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Goya’s La Maja Vestida were there. Coming from New York, I assumed that El Prado was Spain’s version of The Met, which it is and isn’t. It’s not that I’m desensitized to the wonders of Madame X, the Temple of Dendur, or the Met’s instrument collection, but coming from New York can make you feel immune to surprises (jaded, I guess).
To my delight, El Prado was impresionante, a word I like because it captures a hint of the sublime, the way “awesome” classically means awe-inspiring instead of just… well… awesome. It can be literally translated as “impressive,” but “impressive” in English feels like a sterile word in comparison. It’s for accomplishments—acing your courses is impressive, or buying a house is impressive. Realizing that Las Meninas is over 10 feet tall after seeing it on a Nintendo Switch screen is more than just impressive; it dominates the space and transports you. If you stand close enough, it occupies your whole field of vision.
El Prado is also special because photography isn’t allowed, so you end up really looking at everything instead of taking a photo (or glimpsing a masterpiece through a dozen other phone screens). You can get lost in the details or struck by Velázquez’s use of perspective; in an enormous, dark, palatial room, your eye is drawn to a five-year-old who has more wealth than you can really grasp. Centuries worth of power (and inbreeding) distilled into a tiny figure. A neat thing I did not notice in Animal Crossing is that you can get a sense of the scale within the painting itself, as the left side features Velázquez painting on an enormous canvas, presumably this painting.
You might be thinking, “Katharine, Las Meninas is a masterpiece commissioned by the most powerful family in Europe. Of course it’s big.” You’re not wrong! The thing is, everything in El Prado is huge. It’s maximalism incarnate—the paintings are gigantic, and quantity here means a good chunk of an artist’s oeuvre. It’s not like the Met, where there are a few paintings by every artist under the sun. There’s a whole hall of Rubens! I’ve seen Rubens before, but you really get a sense of what Rubenesque means when you see 80 curvy babes in a row. Apparently, this has to do with El Prado’s former status as a royal collection—beginning in the 16th century, the kings and queens of Spain bought what they liked, and they bought a lot of it. The museum’s website says each painter is “represented in a superlative manner”—the most Goyas, the most Titians, etc.
This is something I’m simultaneously kind of sour about because it means that artist-specific museums in their home cities don’t get the blockbuster paintings. Sorolla is Valencian, but there’s not much of his in Valencia—we saw an exhibition of his juvenilia when Brian’s mom Ada visited in March, and there’s currently a temporary exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, but it’s not a permanent thing. Meanwhile, El Prado has Chicos en el Playa, which I found really striking because I can see his influence on the way Ada paints the water, a type of artistry that captures iridescence.
It was also cool to see some of Sorolla’s more political works, including this painting protesting the labor conditions of fishermen, entitled ¡Aún dicen que el pescado es caro!(And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive!).
The Goya museum in Zaragoza, while light on his paintings, is impresionante in its own way. The top floor features dozens of his engravings, which captured current events (focusing largely on the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars) and commented on societal expectations and norms. Brian and I spent an hour and a half looking at these in April when we visited the city for my 10K. They ranged from delightful and romantic to some of the most haunting, gruesome drawings I’ve ever seen.
Opposite to El Prado’s emphasis on size, the engravings draw you in because you need to get close to see the details. A drawing that looks kind of innocuous quickly becomes stomach-wrenching; a man garroted, a head separated from a body.
Like a lot of Goya’s work, these etchings, while journalistic, also have a surreal quality. Brian noted that everyone seems to be looking at you, speaking to the way these represent not just an event but a memory, the perpetual gaze of the victims suggesting trauma, a feeling of being implicated in their terror. Bien heavy.
The cumulative nature of witnessing and documenting the worst, most violent impulses of mankind clearly left a mark on Goya, first causing him to be expelled from his position in the court (though spared by the Inquisition). The Black Paintings are stark, haunting, surreal; the unsettling nature of his etchings cranked up to 11.
These are also quite large, and they convey a bleakness that is hard to bear. I wouldn’t call them nihilistic; the presence of spirits, witches, and entities allude to a world beyond our mortal one, but it’s like Goya tiptoed to the edge of the abyss, stared outward, and saw an eternity that echoed back a distorted image of our lived suffering. Some of these are just cool, like The Witches’ Sabbath, but some, like The Drowning Dog, made me feel like weeping. Saturn Devouring His Son did not disappoint, but the longer you stare at it the harder it is to keep looking; Saturn has his son’s severed arm in his mouth but is looking at you, as if you’re next.
Song of the Month:
A song that I find impresionante is “Astor” by Madrid-based Axolotes Mexicanos, maybe the only song I’ve ever heard about a friend breakup. A little crying-is-my-cardio moment, you can dance your tears away to this pop-punk-flecked bop about missing someone who just doesn’t want to talk to you anymore.
¡Hasta Luego!
— Kata
I can't wait to book a random / last-minute visit too! Glad you had fun and got to catch up with Tatiana.
I think the Drowning Dog is the saddest of all the paintings.