Tuesday, May 3rd
The Prada Museum. Huge. Filled with masterpieces and tourists. The first test was getting in (“Not this line?” “Over there?” “But we just came from there.” Indifferent, heard-it-all-before shrug.), and after that, we played Find the Painting.
The Prado recommends focusing on fifteen of its masterpieces to avoid being overwhelmed, so Stew had researched eleven of them before leaving on the trip. One was on loan to the Hermitage, so that left only ten, and most of these were not in the rooms where on-line sources said they'd be. (“Oh, that's now in Room X; go down that way, take the elevator to the first floor, and it's to your left in Gallery Y.”)
So far so good. At least we know the painting is in the building. But once on the first floor (second floor in the US), we find that—like the first floor—there are seemingly endless corridors of rooms filled with painting, and to the left and also to the right of most of them are even more rooms, each one also leading to more rooms running parallel to the main corridor until one of them leads to a corridor of room running perpendicular to the other corridors.
Guards were usually (but not always) a help when you could fine one, but there were surprisingly few given the vast number of paintings you could walk right up to. Stew was reminded of a cartoon in The New Yorker of a mouse with a GPS device around its neck turning a corridor in a maze. The caption was, “Recalculating, recalculating.”
In the end and after forcing ourselves to pass by dozens of lesser masterpieces, we found and listened to Stew's lecturettes on Las Meninas by Valazquez, The Annunciation by Fra Angelico, The Cardinal by Raphael, The Emperor Charles V on Horseback by Titan, The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosh, The Three Graces by Rubens, Self Portrait by Durer, Artimis by Rembrandt, a 1st Century AD sculpture of Orestes and Pylades, and The 3rd of May 1808 by Goya.
After awhile, Steven went off to explore on his own, and later in the morning, he and Marty left for a trip to the cemetery to visit the grave of the person she'd written her doctoral dissertation on, Dolores Ibarruri, a leader in the doomed war to defeat Franco in the 1930s. Tosh and Bob bravely stuck out the tour to the very end.
Steward was astonished at one point that he was so emotionally affected by the Goya painting. It depicts the pitiless and machine-like killing of unarmed Spanish civilians who had resisted Napoleon's mercenaries the day before. Perhaps museum fatigue had worn him down, or perhaps the painting touched his deep vein of despair about the long, bloody history of the human race, but he had to ask Marty to finish reading his notes on the painting.
In the evening, Bob and Tosh went to a flamenco performance while everyone else returned to the hotel. The next day, Bob reported that well over half of it was singing (or wailing) to the accompaniment of two guitars and a drummer. The dancers were well past their prime and could have used time in the gym, but what they lacked in sex appeal they made up for in passion. The room was packed, the crowd was loud and everyone made the best of it. Now that can be checked off the list of 'things-to-do-sometime-in-this-life.'
