Date: 06-01-2008
Owning Institution: The Prado
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010  
Subject:   Now  17th Century    

Dark-suited and silver-haired, Rafael Moneo is the endearingly self-effacing architect responsible for the new extension to the Prado in Madrid. A quietly enthusiastic man, he clearly dislikes talking about his own work and prefers to stress how honoured he feels to have been chosen to remodel Spain’s greatest museum. In fact, he gives the impression that he would far rather talk about Old Master paintings than modern architecture, full stop. “The Prado, for a Spaniard, holds the most sacred things, the things we love the most. We feel that our culture has been most deeply represented, in many ways, by our painters. I remember myself coming to the Prado as a child, and running through the main galleries, and finding first, the very earliest Christian painters, later the still lifes of Zurbaran, the virgins of Murillo, the darkness of Ribera… Then you take a rest and come to Velazquez, the great Velazquez, with this sense of reality that conveys the deepest sense of facing the world. You feel that in Velazquez, the fiction of his spaces is a way of grasping true space, grasping truth itself” – an architect’s praise for a painter, if ever there was one.

Moneo’s evident enthusiasm for the art contained within the Prado made him a good choice as architect of a scheme designed, above all, to free more space for the display of the museum’s immense permanent collections. Staff and services are re-housed in the extension, which also contains a new space for temporary exhibitions and a dizzyingly expanded museum shop that somewhat resembles a spaceship. It also allows for a new entrance to the museum, alleviating, at least by a little, the appalling crowd congestion and waiting times that have long been the bane of the Prado.

The most daring stroke of the design involved taking apart, stone by stone, an early eighteenth-century cloister which stood, inconveniently, on the only site where the Prado could be extended. This was then reconstructed and placed on the top floor of the extension, like late siglo d’oro icing on a modern architectural cake. The light that floods through the translucent covering of its roof fills the rest of the building, through which a hollow core, glazed all round, has been cut. One of the most striking elements of the new building is the choice of colour for the walls, namely a fierce Pompeiian red. “It is a tribute to the classical aesthetic of the eighteenth century,” Moneo explains, adding somewhat ambiguously that “it is also the red of Goya.” To be precise, it is exactly the same red as the gore that courses from the mutilated and cannibalised corpse in Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. Yet the result is not morbid, but carnivalesque and life-affirming – a far cry, certainly, from the white cube of most modern art galleries. In fact Moneo’s whole new extension feels like a full-blooded celebration of the power of art.

The exhibition that marks the opening of the new extension is – as Moneo doubtless would have wished – devoted to Velazquez. Entitled “Velazquez’s Fables”, its focus is on the artist as a teller of tales, a painter of mythologies and biblical legends. Rarely have so many of the artist’s religious pictures been brought together, the result being an interestingly skewed view of his oeuvre as a whole.  In many past exhibitions, Velazquez’s portraits have drawn the eye, with their piercing humanity, disconcerting realism and philosophical depth. In their absence, it might have been supposed that other aspects of the painter’s sensibility might have come to the fore. But that is not quite the case. Velazquez’s attempts to imagine other worlds suggest that the only world that ever really fascinated him was that of the here and now.

The exhibition opens with several of the startlingly naturalistic religious paintings carried out by the artist during his youth in Seville. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, on loan from the National Gallery in London, is shown together with the Supper at Emmaus from Dublin’s National Gallery. Each painting contrasts a scene of humble domestic toil, shown in the foreground, with a miraculous event from the life of Christ transpiring in the middle distance – seen in each case through a window, or hatch, leading to another room. In the first painting, a kitchen maid sullenly grinds garlic in a mortar while behind her Christ, on another plane of perspective and another plane of reality, discourses on the importance of the contemplative life. In the second, a serving girl, bustling about her pots and pans, seems to freeze at the moment when the risen Christ reveals his identity to his followers at Emmaus. As devotional works of art, these pictures were perhaps intended to prompt thoughts about the difficulty of rising above the world of mundane tasks and chores, into the realm of true spiritual awareness. Yet Velazquez’s methods and devices suggest that he had the greatest sympathy for those to whom transports of mystic vision did not come easily. He paints the kitchen implements, the stuff of ordinary life, with haunting virtuosity; while the biblical scenes are rendered in a very different, more abstracted register, almost like pictures within the picture – visions of a higher sphere, not readily brought within the compass of mortal life.

The exhibition juxtaposes the works of Velazquez with those of his contemporaries and predecessors, often in ways that tend to emphasise his humane but fundamentally disenchanted singularity of vision. To see El Greco’s Annunciation of 1600 in close proximity to Velazquez’s Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and Saint John the Evangelist on Mount Patmos is to realise, with renewed force, how profoundly earthbound Velazquez’s art remains – even when it is, ostensibly, most directly addressed to mystical experience. The figures in El Greco’s art are whirled into a vortex of flame-like forms intended to express the annihilation of matter by spirit. Those in Velazquez remain heavily rooted in a sense of the real. His virgin is a shy young girl from Seville, standing incongruously on the globe of the moon in a very real night sky, while his St John is a solemn young man in a dark landscape, straining to see a vision painted so hazily it might almost be no more than a flash of lightning.

Velazquez was exceptional in the Spain of the so-called Golden Age, a culture preoccupied to the point of obsession with mystical dreams and visions. His contemporary Zurbaran painted images of the saints in the throes of visions that perfectly encapsulate the widespread seventeenth-century Spanish Catholic belief that this world and the world of the spirit are coterminous – that the miraculous might at any moment erupt into the everyday. The exhibition includes his Apparition of the Apostle Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco, of 1629, a characteristically hallucinogenic work in which the kneeling saint, isolated in darkness, is suddenly confronted by a flame-wreathed vision of St Peter, upside down on a crucifix. It is quite impossible to imagine Velazquez painting such an impassioned, visionary work of art. His most famous devotional picture, Christ on the Cross of 1632, is exhibited close to the Zurbaran, as well as to a bloody, polychrome sculpture of the dead Christ by Gregorio Fernandez, done in the late 1620s – all pallid flesh and lank hair and suppurating wounds to be kissed and caressed by the devout.

Velazquez’s Christ, created within a few years of each of these two works, is almost shockingly different. The figure is sublimely beautiful, raised on the cross like a sculpture on a plinth. There is no sense of strain, or pain, for all the carefully orchestrated rivulets of blood that drip from the wounds, and that merge with the tresses of hair that have fallen across Christ’s face. All this might be intended to suggest his transcendence of pain, his victory over death. But the effect is anaesthetic. It is as if the central image of the Christian faith has been used as the pretext for a dazzling but essentially academic exercise.

The show also contains one of Velazquez’s very rare depictions of actual supernatural intervention, in the form of the spectacularly strange Temptation of Saint Thomas Aquinas of 1632. This is perhaps the most bizarrely camp religious painting of the Spanish seventeenth century. The moon-faced harlot sent to tempt Saint Thomas scurries comically away, as two beautiful angels swoop down to comfort him after his recent ordeal – a trial of faith involving a smouldering piece of firewood, some books and a quill pen. This is hagiography conceived as psycho-sexual comedy, a prefect justification of the great Ortega y Gasset’s belief that Velazquez found it very hard indeed to immerse himself with all due seriousness in the world of seventeenth-century Spanish Catholicism.

It is interesting to see how assured he instantly becomes when given a human story or subject to explore. He can paint a theme from the Old Testament, such as Joseph’s Bloodied Coat Presented to Jacob of 1630, without qualms precisely because it enables him to focus on a single moment of drama – the agony of the father, the knowing and half-compassionate guilt of the sons who are betraying him, the outrage of the dog at their feet, yapping its knowledge of the dastardly deed that has been done.

The show also includes many of Velazquez’s finest mythologies, such as the wonderfully earthy Bacchus, surrounded by his boozy companions; the melancholic Mars, wearing nothing but a rumpled blue loincloth and a helmet absurdly too big for him; the Spinners, Velazquez’s late, enigmatic meditation on the Pallas-Arachne myth; as well as the Rokeby Venus, no less, part of an outstanding package of loans from the National Gallery (payback, no doubt, for the many favours received from the Prado that made the National’s own recent Velazquez show possible).

For all their variety, these “fables”, these works of Velazquez’s imagination, seem paradoxically united by one thing – a deep-rooted distrust of imagination, in the sense of myth and fantasy. Kings will dream of building empires that last for all eternity; women will dream of being beautiful forever; artists will dream of vying with the gods; people will dream of meeting Jesus Christ face to face. Velazquez paints those dreams while simultaneously exposing their frailty – just as in Las Meninas, his most celebrated work of all, he exposes the mechanisms of pictorial myth-making by painting a behind-the-scenes picture of a king having his state portrait painted, creaking props and all. Legends, illusions, propaganda – these things should always be treated with extreme caution, the art of Velazquez declares. This world and what we have in it are all we can truly be sure of.