My Prado

My street, Calle de los Madrazo, was named for two famous brothers, but Madrazo seemed strangely spelled, since to my mind the noun as well as the pronoun should have had an s at the end. I was not as interested in the origins of things then as in their immediate consequences, but later it came to my knowledge that this was because, in Spanish, surnames are never pluralized.  The grammatical impasse is usually avoided by calling, for example, “the Romeros”, “la familia Romero”, but in the case of a famous, or infamous, number of family members, it is correct to say “Los Romero”. The Madrazos, as we would put it, were 19^th century painters, some of whose very academic works hung in the Prado Museum, although they never caught my attention when I went there.

Which was quite often, since the Museum was a short walk down the hill from my flat.  It  was in Madrid that I discovered, to my delight, that contrary to what my mother had led me to believe, the first great painters were not the Impressionists.  My new friends – who soon became my old friends, and whom I eagerly visited every time I walked across the leafy avenue and paid for my ticket – were Goya, Velázquez, Bosch, Van der Weyden and Breughel, as well, of course, as Memling.

I knew Goya’s etchings from Mariano’s house in Mexico (and still had the two my friend had given me) so he was the first one to absorb my attention, on my explorations of the stately building.  The edifice itself had been built in the 18^th century as a natural history museum, when the main interest of the period’s enlightened monarchs was in science.  Later – 150 years before my time – it became Spain’s national painting gallery, eventually receiving all of the Spanish royal collections, except the works kept by the Escorial monastery and the Royal Chapel of Granada.

My first love was for Goya’s Pinturas Negras, or “black paintings”, which he created after his career as a court painter was finished, in a lonely retreat, deaf and meditating on the horrors of the bigoted and superstitious world he had lived in.  Few of these mysterious murals were seen by anyone until long after his death, which makes them, perhaps, the first example of art created solely for the satisfaction of the creator, without any communicative, commercial or religious purpose. Therefore they seemed astonishingly “modern” and almost a century ahead of their time.

Later, when I began to tire of modern art’s obsessive introspectiveness, I found more pleasure in Goya’s light-hearted pictures of country life.  My favourites were the huge “cartoons”, quickly-brushed scenes he painted as patterns for tapestries.  They showed young ladies and gentlemen dressed as peasants and dancing the fandango, castanets raised above their bandana’d heads, around baskets of grapes on the banks of the Manzanares River, under a pastel-blue and egg-white Castilian sky.  The ardently blushing cheeks and the eagerly snapping fingers speak more to me, today, of the ephemeral nature of youth and beauty than the pinturas negras. 

And if I had to choose one painting in the world as the most complete, for the story it tells of innocent men being slain for the crimes of others, for the soldiers hunched around the blazing lamp, with their backs in shadow and the spires and roofs of the darkened city behind them, and, most poignantly of all, for the desperate faces of the victims, it would be Goya’s “The Shootings of May 3^rd”.

As a painter, I admired Velázquez as much as Goya, but belonging to an earlier century, when artists were preoccupied with the things in front of them rather than those within, I found it harder to form a “friendship” with him.  But I thought that the informal family scene of Las Meninas, with the painter’s own self-portrait standing behind his easel, reflected in the same mirror as the little princess and her ladies-in-waiting, her dwarf and her dog, was an amazing “coup de théatre”.

His many official portraits of leering and squinting, scraggly-necked blue-bloods said more to me about the effects of in-breeding than natural lighting.  But I soon got over my initial repulsion for the wretched Habsburgs he was paid to portray and, standing closer to the canvases, found that I only had to isolate a small section of brocaded dress or velvet cape, masking the more prosaic surroundings with my fingers, to obtain a flood of dazzling brushstrokes worthy of Cezanne.

But I hated El Greco, the Greek with the Italian nickname (in Spanish it would have been El Griego), whose workshop mass-produced his wan-faced saints and martyrs in sickly yellows and greens, so admired in their day.  But Spaniards, like Italians, have always had a weakness for the facile charms of maudlin mysticism.  

The master of El Prado we were all mad about then, with our fascination for Freudian psychoanalysis, was the Flemish painter known in Spanish as El Bosco – Hieronymus Bosch.

His cynical vision of humanity was best expressed in the triptych ironically entitled “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, teeming with tiny, surrealistic scenes against a backdrop of heaven, purgatory and hell. There were pigs dressed as nuns, human legs wriggling out of fish eggs, knives protruding from ears, toads swallowing priests, and bare buttocks almost everywhere.  Although it was meant by its creator to reprimand sinners for their follies, to us, for whom neither sin nor folly existed, it was a cracked-open human brain, with its crudest fears and desires laid bare. 

Two things intrigued me about the many Flemish paintings in the museum: one, how they got there in the first place, from the other end of Europe, and, two, why the word in Spanish for “Flemish” was the same as for the musical form, flamenco. The fact that I did not  take the trouble to find out until much later in life is not, I think, sufficient reason to refrain from explaining these enigmas now. 

For over one hundred years, Flanders effectively belonged to Spain. At the end of the 15^th century, the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, fearful of their rival France, forged an alliance through marriage with the Austrian Empire, then in control of the Low Countries.  Since newly-unified Spain, with its discoveries in America, soon became the more powerful of the two empires, it gained direct control over the countries which are now Holland and Belgium, and kept them until driven out by the Protestant uprisings. Spanish aristocrats were therefore the natural patrons of what is commonly known as the “Flemish” school, even though the style was really French and born in Burgundy (which also belonged to Austria and Spain) and spread not only to the Low Countries but to all of Northern Europe.

As for the double meaning of the Spanish word “flamenco”, it appears to have taken root in the popular mind when Andalucian soldiers began to return from the Low Countries, passing through Madrid on their way home to Seville and Cadiz.  There, the townsfolk heard them carousing late at night and singing their raucous music, with its Moorish and gypsy rhythms.  Since the prim-and-proper madrileños associated the soldiers with Flanders, they contemptuously referred to both them and their drunken chanting as “Flemish”, flamenco.

When I visit the Prado Museum today, I feel I am paying a call on very old friends indeed, even if I do not always find them in their usual rooms.

As well as Goya, Velázquez and Bosch, I stand before Breughel’s drunken peasants and country inns and frozen lakes with ice-skaters, and his Judgment Days, with skeletons on skeletal horses waving their scythes above terrified sinners, scaffolds and bonfires waiting on the horizon. 

I pause before the precious angels and innocent madonnas of Fra Angelico, all in blue and gold and pink  – my first encounter with the Italian painters of the Middle Ages, who inspired my own drawings several years later when I visited Florence, Siena and Assisi. 

But I seek out with brotherly affection – I say “seek” because he is often moved from one corner to the other of the Museum - a painting by Raphael.  Entitled “Portrait of an unknown Cardinal”, it is a lifelike picture of a very young, gaunt cleric in mitred hat, craning out of his elegantly gilded frame and crimson robes.  The sad, sleepy eyes and slightly smiling lips make him seem half mischievous boy and half disenchanted man, just like me.

xxx