Gorging on art - and pastries - in Madrid

A pootle around the Prado with the Habsburgs and Hieronymous Bosch

Photo by Diego Allen on Unsplash

Will America start yet another war in the Middle East? Will we join in? I have no idea and nor does Donald Trump, so today I’m going to write about my trip to Madrid.

If you’re new round here, then welcome! Thanks largely to the kindness of the wonderful

India Knight

, quite a few of you have signed up in the past week. Ironically, this was probably for my most trivial post ever, about how to have a lovely Friday night. But here at Culture Café, we can do what we like. That’s the point of it, for me and for you. We can swing wildly between geopolitics and cocktails, and between the serious (is liberal democracy doomed?) and the urgent (are skinny jeans still acceptable?). That, after all, is how many of us live, scrolling through Instagram as we watch the news, gasping at the terrible things that are happening and also thinking: I wonder where she got that dress?

On the jeans issue, there has definitely been what political commentators like to call a vibe shift. My research, conducted from pavement cafés in Madrid and London, indicates that, for the youngsters, the only way to go is huge. All credit to them for their lack of vanity. If you’re young, you can probably get away with anything. Women in my age-group are advised to go for something called “barrel jeans”. All I can say is: nope. That is a ditch I will die on. Join me in the Resistance!

Anyway. Madrid. We had a 3am start, which wasn’t ideal, but the exciting news was that we didn’t have to take our tiny polythene bags full of minuscule bottles out of our hand luggage (which was our only luggage). A giant step for mankind! I have huge respect for the men and women at security who get up in the middle of the night to bark at passengers about belts, keys and whether or not a lipstick counts as a liquid, but I can’t say it’s the most relaxing part of the journey. Our good cheer was quickly punctured by the Ryanair official who told us, with a tiny, mean smile, that they could close the gate whenever they liked. In spite of her, we made it onto the plane. We landed safely. The sun shone.

I had booked us a lovely apartment on Booking.com, with high ceilings and beams. I don’t know if it ever existed, but after being scammed to the tune of £700, by the person who claimed to be the owner but clearly wasn’t, I’d decided to bypass Booking.com and book a hotel instead. (You can read about scams on Booking.com here.) The hotel was fine. Comfortable, air-conditioned and with a giant bed excellent for collapsing on after two hours’ sleep. Which, of course, is what we did.

After a few hours of blissful communion with high-thread-count sheets, we were ready to hit the cafés. In my perfect life, I would drift from one café offering coffee and pastries to another offering negronis or chilled Chablis and an array of salty snacks. I’d alternate bursts of animated conversation with long periods of silence so I could read or write. Jean-Paul Sartre, eat your heart out.

We went to this café three mornings out of four. I liked the croissants!

Nobody could describe Anthony as Sartre or me as Simone de Beauvoir, though we did manage a bit of animated conversation. What we really excel at is silence. I used to feel sorry for couples who sat in silence. I thought they must be bored out of their skulls. Perhaps they are. Silence can be thick with passive-aggression. It can also be deeply soothing: you are here and I am here and we are drinking this all in and if we have something to say, we will, and if we don’t, we won’t.

What I was drinking in was the elegance of it all: the wide boulevards, the apartment blocks dotted with tiny balconies, the trees, everywhere the trees. We found a little square with cafes on four sides. In the middle there were children playing football, young men playing ping pong, mothers chatting on benches as they watched their toddlers whizz down the slide. As we settled down at a café table, I realised there was a noise I wasn’t used to. Yup, human voices. Everywhere, the hum of conversation, at a volume you’d usually only find in a British pub where men had downed many pints.

Everyone seemed to be drinking a long, red drink. When in Madrid etc, so we ordered it. Summer wine, apparently. Tinto de verano, a mix of red wine and lemonade. It was perfectly pleasant, with some green olives and crisps, but it will never be my aperitivo of choice. My heart is for ever negroni, or, at a push, Campari Spritz. (Or, at a further push, Aperol Spritz, margarita or even, ahem, porn star martini. Life is too short for an indifferent aperitivo or a less than fully chilled white wine. We have to pick our battles and these are mine.)

I fished out my 2002 edition of the Time Out guide to Madrid and started reading up on it. One day, I will do my research before I go away. I will pack before 1am the night before. I will check opening hours and things like Madrid city cards (which could have saved us a fortune). And I will read up on scams and how to avoid them. I will need to have an entirely different personality to do this, but you never know.

I’ve been to Madrid twice but remembered almost nothing about its history or even if I bothered to find out about it on either trip. But it’s fascinating! It became the capital of the Spanish empire in the 17^th century, on the whim of Philip V. Most of the Spanish kings seem to have been called Philip, interspersed with the odd Charles. It was Philip II who moved his court there in 1561. I like the sound of him. He was shy, according to the Time Out guide, and a bit austere. His father had spent his time leading armies into battle. Philip preferred to sit behind his desk. He would sometimes plough through more than 400 documents a day.

Philip II had quite a work ethic. He also had quite a jaw. Most of the Habsburgs had quite a jaw. I got quite fond of it in the next few days and looked forward to spotting it in the vast portraits they commissioned. By the time Charles II came along (the Spanish one, not the English one), that jaw had become a problem. All the cousin-marrying had messed up the Habsburg genes. Poor Charles couldn’t eat solid food and had uncontrollable diarrhoea, which was not ideal in all those elaborate court ceremonies. Having been on a hiking trip last year which involved about 20 people sharing one loo, I can honestly say: my heart goes out to him.

I was deep in Charles II’s diarrhoea when Anthony said he was hungry. I had, after all, eaten most of the snacks, so we moved to the tapas bar on the corner and had what poor Charles II had never managed to get or keep down: patatas bravas, some kind of chorizo dish, some crisp white rioja and some big, garlicky prawns. As we wandered back to our hotel, I thought about all those Habsburg monarchs and the young cousins or even nieces who were shipped across kingdoms and oceans to marry them. I was very grateful indeed that I’d just had to click online to find a lovely man to share my life with. And that, at 51, I’d had time to work out what I liked and what I didn’t.

The next four days were spent mostly in cafés, galleries and parks. I’d love to give you a blow-by-blow account, but this is already getting rather long. Let me just say that the highlight, the absolute, soaring, dizzying highlight, was the Prado.

I’ve been before, but I could go every day

My new favourite place

So many of the paintings are familiar, but when you see them “in real life” they don’t feel familiar. The colours are not like the colours in reproductions or prints. They are blazing, luminous, alive. And then there’s the texture of the paint, the shadow on a face, the humanity shining out of eyes. As you wander from one masterpiece to another, this hits you in somewhere you might call the solar plexus, somewhere you might even call the heart.

Not all the paintings strike in this way, of course. You can have too many madonnas, too many court officials, too many saint Jeromes. You can have too many baby Jesuses: some scrawny, some roly-poly, some haughty, some cuddly, some looking glassily bored. It would, I thought, be fascinating to do a history of art through body shape. There were skinny Adams and Eves and more substantial ones. There were slender young women with swan-like necks and Rubenesque women with luscious curves. Rubens’s “Three Graces” definitely wouldn’t make the cover of Vogue.

There’s treasure after treasure in this collection: works by Botticelli, Rafael and Caravaggio that make you gasp. I’m not, I realised, mad about El Greco, but I would lie at Velàsquez’s feet. I like Goya’s royal paintings, but not his religious works. I like still lives (of flowers and fruit and cheese and wine). I always thought they were a Dutch thing, but some of the most stunning ones in the collection are by Spanish artists: Tomás Hiepes, for example, and Juan de Arellano.

Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is quite something in, let’s say, the flesh. It could put you off sex for life. And what’s with the flowers sprouting out of a bottom?

The opposite of erotic: a tiny patch of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”

Fra Angelico’s “The Annunciation” is so luminous, so bursting with beauty and goodness and joy, it made me want to weep.

I bought a big, fat Prado Guide and have been gorging on it since I got home. I also loved The Thyssen, the private collection of the late Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, widely considered the most important in the world. Here you can see van Eyck’s “Annunciation”, works by Cranach the Elder, Dürer’s “Jesus Among the Doctors”, Caspar David Friedrich’s “Easter Morning” and works by Monet, Manet, Renoir and Cézanne as well as by Braque, Mondrian, O’Keeffe and Hockney. As in the Prado, it’s too much to take in. I loved masses of the paintings, but my heart is in Renaissance Italy. When I become a billionaire industrialist, I’ll be snapping up Fra Angelicoes and Filippo Lippis.

On our last day in Madrid, we went to the Reina Sofia museum and saw “Guernica”, Picasso’s gut-wrenching portrayal of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German bombers supporting the Francoist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Picasso refused to allow the painting to be exhibited in Spain under the Franco regime. It was only brought to Spain in 1981, six years after Franco died and democracy had been restored.

I don’t really have the words to write about “Guernica”. When you stand in front of it, you feel it: this sense of horror, agony and despair. There is Gaza. There is Kiiv. There, now, is Tehran.

It feels surreal that the species that gave us Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation” can also think that blowing up babies is an excellent idea.

Madrid felt to me like a civilized, buzzy place, a city that exalts the simple things in life: a conversation with a friend in the sunshine, with a glass of tinto de verano and a bowl of olives, a trip to the market, a stroll in the park. It has some of the finest art the world has ever seen.

But 50 years ago, this city, this country, was living under a fascist dictatorship. It doesn’t take long to flip a country into a dictatorship. About 70 per cent of the world’s population now lives in a dictatorship. If it can happen to these civilised, art-loving people in this elegant city full of sunshine, it can happen to any of us. Let’s cling on to this flawed, beautiful, priceless thing. If we lose it, we can’t guarantee that we’ll get it back.

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What’s your favourite capital city? And what’s your favourite art gallery? I’d love to hear what you love and why you love it.

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