Of course, when the Prado was opened as a public museum other Spaniards contributed pictures, and some were very good, but essentially the museum reflects the taste of Habsburg and Borbón.
Among the royal donors, three kings stand out. Carlos V regarded Titian (1477–1576) as the best painter in Europe and commissioned several portraits. In the best of these the emperor appears in full armor astride a black horse caparisoned in purple. In a stormy landscape the setting sun illuminates the small, bearded king as he appeared during the notable victory of Spanish forces over German at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547.
The second of the great collectors was Carlos’ son, Felipe II, whose portrait by Titian shows him as a young, intense and capable man. Felipe was known as an ascetic, yet if one segregates the paintings he brought into Spain one finds that he was responsible for the glowing nudes of Titian and Rubens (1577–1640); he also added the wonderful sex-filled paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) to the collection and other lush canvases from Venice and Brussels.
The third of the master collectors is as familiar to us in appearance as one of our own family, for Felipe IV, grandson of Felipe II, was painted numerous times by Velázquez (1599–1660) on horseback, or standing in lace ruffles, or half-length in austere black, or even as seen in a mirror while having his portrait painted. This king stares back at us with heavy-lidded eyes, huge curling mustache and that enormous chin which characterized the Habsburgs. His family is also known to us through many Velázquez portraits: his two wives, his handsome son and above all his adorable little daughter.
The relationship between Felipe and Velázquez was one of the most rewarding in art history, for not only did the royal family provide the artist with some of his finest subjects, but Felipe also commissioned Velázquez to travel in Europe and buy paintings on his behalf. Twice he toured the continent, and many of the choice works in the Prado are there because in riding back and forth between Italian cities he came upon canvases which he thought the king might like.
Today the royal collections are housed in a dark and handsome building located in the center of Madrid. The Prado was originally built in 1787 as a natural history museum but in 1814 was converted for its present use. I had hoped that I might see it in company with Señor Don Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón, who has been associated with it for many decades and has been responsible for its catalogue. Museum people in other countries hold him in high regard, but each time I reported to his office he was engaged elsewhere, so I missed meeting him, but his secretary provided me with a guide who in many ways was even better, because with Sánchez Cantón, I Would have seen merely paintings; with José María Muguruza, I saw everything else.
He was a tall, scholarly Spaniard in his mid-sixties, outspoken and enthusiastic. In the circular tower room which he used for his office he said, ‘Everybody knows me because of my brother. A really great architect. He did lots of the buildings Spain is proud of and I suppose I got my job because of him. He died young, you know. I’m an architect in charge of the Prado and you might like to see some of the crazy things we’ve been doing.’
I said, ‘I’m familiar with the changes. The new wings, the way you’ve converted empty courtyards into new exhibition rooms.’
‘Those things are nothing!’ Muguruza said. ‘Are you game for some real excitement?’ I said I was, and he grabbed a cane which he would use for pointing out details of what had taken place. ‘From the outside does the museum look any different from when you first saw it?’ I shook my head. ‘But from the inside! That’s a different story!’
I did not know what he was talking about, for as I had said, the inside changes had been no different from what take place in any good museum, but what I was about to see was unique. Dr. Muguruza led me up a steep flight of stairs, then another and another, until we stood on the roof of the old building. There, in Madrid sunlight, he said, ‘In the building below us,’ and he kicked on the roof, ‘we have a collection of paintings which are beyond value. What would they bring? Supposing they could be sold? A billion dollars, two billion? And if they were lost, the damage to the human spirit would be incalculable. So we couldn’t risk keeping them in an old building put up a hundred and seventy years ago.’
‘That’s where they still are,’ I said.
‘That’s where you think they are. Come inside and see.’ He led me to a crawl space under the roof and showed me how the vaulted ceiling of the old museum had been left intact, as had the roof on which we had been standing, but between them had been inserted a steel-and-concrete shell nearly a foot thick and invisible from either within or without. The old vertical walls had also been left as they were, and the exhibition walls on which the pictures were hung, but between them new walls of steel and concrete had been inserted.
‘We never closed the museum one day,’ Murguruza said. ‘Working quietly, where no one could see us, we built a concrete cocoon which encloses every area. We have made the museum as fireproof and as burglarproof as possible, because you can’t get into it without penetrating this cocoon.’
I could scarcely believe that this transformation had taken place during the years that I had known the Prado. How had the massive girders and tons of concrete been slipped into position? ‘We were satisfied to work slowly,’ Muguruza said. He jumped up and down on one of the mammoth concrete vaults and asked, ‘What do you suppose is below us right now?’ I didn’t know, and he said, ‘Room XII,’ and I visualized that finest single room of the world’s museums, a room whose twenty-six paintings represented one of the chief treasures of history.
‘Jump up and down on it,’ Dr. Muguruza cried, and I did so. The concrete shell did not even reverberate, but I felt uncomfortable jumping on top of Room XII of the Prado.
When I climbed down from the roof and studied the museum from street level I could find no mark that betrayed its renovation, and I reflected that much of modern Spain was like this, heavily reconstructed but with few external marks showing, because the comfortable old appearances had been retained.
How good is the Prado collection? Because of the personal manner in which it was assembled, it has to be uneven. Since the kings of Spain considered Dutch painting plebeian because it portrayed scenes of everyday life, the Prado has practically no Dutch school, and since they cared little for English painting, none were there until a few years ago when a New Yorker who had grown to love the museum unexpectedly gave a Gainsborough and a Lawrence, which look quite out of place. The French school is poorly represented, with no moderns at all, and several of the major Italian schools are ignored. In comprehensiveness the Prado does not begin to compare with great collections like those in the national galleries of London and Washington.
But where it is strong, it has no equal. Thanks to Carlos and Felipe it has the world’s top collection of Titians. One room alone contains sixteen prime works by the Venetian, a staggering collection of portraits, religious subjects and nudes. As if that were not enough, in the next room hang eleven more, each good enough to be a major item in an ordinary museum, and in the storeroom hide an additional dozen!
Equally rich is the Rubens collection. In room after room the visitor finds those choice canvases crowded with nudes with which he has been familiar for years without realizing that they were all in Madrid.
That we can still enjoy these nudes of Titian and Rubens is something of a miracle, for although they were among the favorites of the early kings, by the later they were judged scandalous, and toward the end of the eighteenth century were condemned to be burned. Plans were made to destroy every nude in the collection, but in 1792 a group of men, at considerable risk to themselves, hid the offending pictures in a back room of a lesser museum, where they stayed unseen for more than thirty years until it was safe to bring them forth again.
The museum contains many Italian masterpieces. Raphael’s (1483–1570) ‘Portrait of an Unidentified Cardinal’ is here, staring at us coldly from beneath his red hat; scholars have suggested se
ven different churchmen as the possible sitter, but he remains a mystery. Here also is Paolo Veronese’s (1528–1588) radiant little jewel, ‘The Finding of Moses,’ probably the best painting this polished artist ever did.
My favorite among the Italians is Correggio’s (1494–1534) exquisite ‘Noli Me Tangere’ (Touch Me Not), about as fine a work as the late Italian school produced, for the figure of Christ with arms extended has the quality of supreme religious painting, while the Magdalene in her rich brocade represents humanity at its most enchanting. The landscape, showing as it does the hour of dawn, is faultlessly done and all parts combine to make a most gratifying work.
One of the surprises of the Prado is a series of small rooms on the second floor, so unpretentious that many visitors miss them. Here are displayed the Flemish and German paintings collected by Felipe II and his contemporaries, and to understand the work of these schools one simply must visit the Prado. Two works easiest to grasp are the powerful self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and the exquisite little blue painting by Gerald David (c. 1450–1523) showing the Holy Family resting on its way to Egypt. It is one of the purest of paintings, a jewel perfect in all parts.
The picture here that no one should miss is, of course, Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Delights,’ in which the precursor of surrealism presents a teeming canvas flanked by two wings in which the delights of sensuality are portrayed with heavy but not offensive emphasis on sex. The central panel is divided into three parts: at the top a lake on which fantastic pleasure boats appear and over whose rivers nightmare bridges rise; in the middle a pool in which lovers swim and around which ecstatic couples parade on all kinds of beasts, including unicorns, griffins and camels; at the bottom a bewildering maze of persons engaged in various delights, such as lovers entrapped in a giant clamshell, dancers whose heads unite to form an owl and a pair surrounded by an evanescent soap bubble.
The curious thing about the ‘Garden of Delights’ is that it was a favorite picture of Felipe II, and we know that it occupied a place of honor in his palace, but this particular Bosch is only one of several, in the Prado, for the more the men of Felipe’s time brooded over religious matters, the more they appreciated these lusty pictures from the north.
The most important picture in the Flemish section, however is of quite a different kind. Many critics have held it to be one of the four or five most significant paintings in the world, and I know two experts who deem it the best canvas ever painted. It is of particular interest to anyone visiting the Prado, for it illustrates better than words can explain the peculiar quality of this collection.
Early in his life Felipe II heard that in a small chapel in Louvain, dedicated to the Confraternity of Crossbowmen, there stood an altarpiece by Roger van der Weyden (1400?–1464) depicting the body of Christ being lowered from the cross. Visitors familiar with the marvelous painting reported to Felipe, ‘It is the greatest of the north.’ In vain the king tried to buy it, and when this proved impossible he sent a court painter to copy it, and with the copy he was content for several decades. Later his aunt, the Queen of Hungary, succeeded in acquiring the painting for her collection, and remembering how much her nephew desired it, gave it to him as a present.
In the depiction of the ten differentiated figures, in their placement, in the use of color, design and space, and above all in the symbolization of religious emotion, this marvelous stark painting is one of the major accomplishments of western culture. The best painting in the world? That is too strong. One of the four or five best? Without question.
The lasting story of the Prado lies, however, not in these importations from foreign lands but in paintings from the Spanish school. In this field the Prado has no equal or even any close competitor.
Leave the Flemish rooms and walk down the long corridor housing the works of the Spanish school, and see for yourself the incredible richness of this collection. To take only one example, near the rotunda you will find not one elegant Murillo (1617–1682), ‘Immaculate Conception,’ with Mary, surrounded by angels, standing on the defeated crescent of Islam, but three separate versions. The third and finest has a strange history: when Napoleon conquered Spain in 1808 to place his brother Joseph on the throne, his general in command of the invasion, Marshal Soult, packed up this Murillo and hauled it back to Paris with him, where it found a home in the Louvre. More than a hundred years later, in 1941, the Franco government in Spain arranged a deal with the Vichy government in France whereby the Soult Murillo was returned to Madrid in exchange for a Velázquez which went to the Louvre, whereupon certain Spanish art critics said, ‘To trade a Velázquez for a third copy of a Murillo! We Spaniards must be crazy!’ A kinder judgment would be that the Soult Madonna is superior to the other two versions, and to have three such Murillos together in one spot, while other museums have none, demonstrates how lucky the Prado is where Spanish painting is concerned.
Leading off from the Murillos is the long, specially lighted room on whose ceiling I had been jumping. It is known simply as Room XII and has no equal in other museums. Many travelers who schedule their trips so as to see the Prado come Only to see this room.
It contains twenty-six paintings by Velázquez, works so varied and magnificent that of themselves they comprise a museum. One Spanish guidebook says bluntly, ‘In this room and those nearby hang all the best Velázquez paintings in existence.’ Certainly, if one wants to understand this master he must come to Room XII.
Although Madrid is the youngest city we shall visit, its Retiro Park, with its stone royalty, has a classic beauty.
I have spent so many hours here that they must add up to days or even weeks, and even yet I don’t know how to view it properly. First, of course, one looks at the huge ‘Lancers’ on the end wall, a painting, like Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ in Amsterdam, so complete that one either perceives its majesty at once or misses it. Words cannot help. There it is, a mammoth canvas overflowing with vitality and perfection, and some people are content to spend their time with it, ignoring the other paintings.
I prefer, however, that series of three powerful canvases in which Velázquez portrays ordinary Spanish life: the weavers, the blacksmiths, the winebibbers. Any one of these paintings, given a room to itself in some museum in London or New York, would be the gem of the collection, but in Room XII it is merely one among twenty-six.
Most visitors to the Velázquez room stand a long time before the two portraits of a young prince named Baltasar Carlos, for these are two of the most engaging and tragic child portraits ever painted. They are engaging because in the first we see him at the age of four or five, dressed as a knight astride a pudgy brown pony set in an idealized landscape. In the second we see him at the age of six—the canvas tells us that was his age—posing as a hunter, cap awry, attended by two brilliantly painted dogs.
The pictures are tragic because of what happened to Baltasar Carlos. The son of Felipe IV, he was a handsome child, apparently intelligent, and Spain was relieved to know that the throne one day would pass into his hands. As he matured he became even more attractive, and Velázquez painted him at various ages, showing him finally as a young fellow of sober bearing with a conspicuous Habsburg chin, but from fifteen on, the young heir fell into debauchery, from which at seventeen he died. The throne passed into the hands of his near-idiot half brother, whom we saw at the auto-da-fé of 1680, Carlos the Bewitched, and the Spanish Habsburgs were doomed.
Women visitors to Room XII linger before the graceful portrait of a little girl, Velázquez’s personal favorite, the Princess Margarita, who would grow up to marry the Emperor of Austria. Velázquez painted her many times; several European museums contain versions showing her standing in extremely wide dresses made of lace and satin, and in a moment we shall see that his masterwork also focused on her. By all accounts the little princess was a charmer who matured into a responsible empress, but like her brother Baltasar Carlos, she died prematurely, at the age of twenty-two. That Velázquez loved her st
range mixture of imperial dignity and childish charm there can be no doubt.
Some years ago a group of art experts in Florence became irritated by the publicity given the fact that Rembrandt’s ‘Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer’ had sold for $2,300,000, and they issued a statement estimating that the famous first room of the Uffizi, with its three versions of the Virgin enthroned by Cimabue, Duccio and Giotto, would bring $25,000,000 if offered at auction. What would the contents of the Prado Room XII bring? For the ‘Lancers’ I suppose a bid of $5,000,000 would be only an opener. For any one of the three genre scenes the price would have to be around four or five million. For the great portraits? I suppose the final figure for the room would be well above $80,000,000, which was one reason why I was somewhat apprehensive about jumping on it.
In an isolated room not far from Room XII hangs in solitary majesty a Velázquez which has attracted attention since the day it was finished. On a special plaque set into the wall nearby, the curators of the Prado describe it as ‘The culminating work of universal painting.’ It is ‘Las Meninas’ (The Maids of Honor) and it unfolds on many planes, one behind the other. Six conspicuous ones are, first, a lifelike dog; second, little Princess Margarita attended by her maids of honor and a well-known dwarf; third, Velázquez standing back from his easel on which he is painting a picture which we cannot see; fourth, a man and woman observing the scene; fifth, a wall containing a mirror in which we see that Velázquez is painting the portrait of Margarita’s father and mother, Felipe IV and Queen Mariana; sixth, seen through a doorway, a flight of stairs up which a chamberlain is walking.
The picture is unbelievably complex, a kind of exercise in dexterity that only an established painter would attempt in order to prove that he could do it. The various planes are indicated by perpective, the interplay of light and dark, and a clever use of colors. The figures are well done and breathe vitality, but the essential mystery of this work lies outside such considerations. It is a moment of family life caught in suspension, and the groups represented are as real today as when Velázquez painted them.