Sleeping till 8:30 was a problem because our tickets at the Prado were for 9 AM. However, the admission people didn’t object when we showed up ½ hour late. We started with Velasquez & Las Meninas (jammed w/ Asian tourists – I assumed they were Japanese but S said maybe Chinese & sure enough, when I listened to one guide, he did sound Chinese.) Velasquez also painted the dwarfs who were part of the court.
We worked through many, many Goyas – I’d never seen many of his paintings (because they’re mostly at the Prado?), the 2nd & 3rd of May, the Maja (I kept teasing S that he only liked her body). I esp liked the dowager duchess of Gorgenza (?), in the same room as the Majas, because her eyes showed character. Made me realize how hard it is to remember paintings.
There was a room of Hieronymous Bosch – because Felipe II liked Bosch, said S, but not that much of other Flemish artists. It took a while to realize the collection was mostly what the Spanish Royal Family had accumulated; it wasn’t supposed to be art of the world.
That said, there were some beautiful Romanesque frescoes that had been added to get closer to Art of Spain. We came out for a break around 2 PM (since our hotel is so close). V aware how old we were getting, with backs & feet that got sore. V. aware how glad we were to find benches.
El Greco & most of the Baroque don’t do that much for me – not sure why.
V. difficult to find things in the big (heavy) Prado guide – which was organized by painter, not room. For example, Goya was spread out among many rooms on 2 floors, with his latest paintings (the black paintings), including the ½ submerged dog (el perro semi-humido) on the first floor. Some rooms had the interpretive placards translated to English, some didn’t. So S and I were continually passing back and for the the guidebook, and hunting by places. Also, the guidebook was organized by: All Spanish painting, more or less chronological by artist, and then Italian, then French, etc.
Beautiful Fra Angelico annunciation.
Ate dinner at an expensive place heavy on marine creepy-crawlies, where the service was slow. S got v. cross.
Did I narrate the saga of the safe? S couldn’t enter the code. The maint guy said it was the batteries & another guy changed the code. I was going to the gym & tried entering a new code but got messed up by the lack of 0, and it wouldn’t open when I tried and said I was blocked. By then, the guy with the mastercode had left. HOWEVER, S correctly surmised that my code had never “taken” and that the original 1234 code would open the safe.
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