Wednesday afternoon, 9 May 2018
This afternoon I again, after all these years, got to wander the halls of the Museo del Prado. I took an art history class during my time in Spain, and we met every Friday morning at the Prado. There was something wonderful about getting to know a great museum that way, visiting for a few hours every week. There was never a sense of needing to see it all at once, which is always an impossibility at every great museum. Try to see too much and you might effectively see nothing at all.
I wouldn't get to have weekly visits this time around, and so I went walking through the halls with a certain focus, looking to find my old favorites.
I made my first stop at Velázquez' Las Meninas. All these years later, and it still struck me as amazing, even radical, almost post-modern in its treatment of subject and object and its relationship with the viewer.
And El Bosco's Jardín de las Delicias had only become more surreal, both in its treatment of subject and in its very existence. It's like 400 years ahead of its time, as though El Bosco and Salvador Dalí had been contemporaries, influencing each other.
I went to the far south end of the museum to see Goya's Pinturas Negras. They display them a bit differently now, to the paintings' detriment I think (or is that just the resistance to change that comes with nostalgia?), but I had forgotten just how somber and haunting they really are. They feel more mysterious to me now than they did back then, for I have lived many more years, and I no longer have my whole life ahead of me, and so I can somewhat better comprehend the mind that chose to create works like this.
But it was perhaps Velázquez' "Cristo Crucificado" that moved me the most. I'd forgotten about it completely. It is both a genius' study of the human form and a profound spiritual meditation. Christ, crucified, glows as though from within, and there's nothing in the painting but the man and the cross against a black background. It projects from within itself a vast silence, a story of suffering, and the end of suffering.
Welcome back, old friend, the paintings said. We've been waiting for you.
It's good to be back, my friends. Oh how I have missed you.
Links to some of the works I mention:
Las Meninas
Jardín de Las Delicias
Pinturas Negras: El Gran Cabrón
Pinturas Negras: Saturno
Cristo Crucificado