Travels to Spain - Madrid

When in Madrid, enjoy everything the city has to offer. Visit Museo del Prado and Reina Sofia on Sunday and you will enjoy it even more since the admission is free on Sundays. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza always has an admission charge but is an absolute must if you came to Madrid for culture. Also don't forget Museo de Bellas Artes, various puertas, and Piazza de Espana with the monument to Cervantes, as well as Templo de Debod.

Quick Tips:

Before you go, get the brochures that Spanish tourist bureau sends. They are very helpful with the information on hotels in various cities, since they list more hotels than you can find on the web. To get the brochures, go to their website here, then e-mail the closest local office and tell them where you are planning on going and what you need. You will get a confirmation e-mail and requested brochures in two weeks. They have brochures on particular cities and on each province. Even though you may be told here that in Spain phone number that start with 900, 901, 902, 903 are toll-free, that's not true, you pay half for the call.

Best Way To Get Around:

In Madrid you can either walk or take a subway (metro). City center is really not large and every walks. Metro is very cheap. Buy a bonoticket: it costs five euros for 10 trips and it's transferrable. Taxis don't overcharge, however if you hire a taxi at the Barajas airport, it can cost you anywhere from 20 to 40 euros to get to city center depending on the traffic and time of day.

In the Museo del Prado, there is currently (through May 18, 2003) on display, there is an exhibit "Vermeer and the Dutch Interior" in rooms 16B, 19, 20, 21, 22 (See Part III).

The best time to visit Prado is Sunday because admission is free, but this means that you will have to wait in line to get in. If you want to see the Vermeer exhibit (which I encourage you to see), there is a separate line, so if you are planning on seeing both, get in the line to see Vermeer and you will get two separate tickets.

The entrance to the museum is through the Goya entrance located on the planta baja (lower floor) on the corner of Paseo del Prado and Plaza de las Cortes. The museum building is very large but not extremely impressive in its architecture. It is a typical neo-classical building built in 1785. It has several entrances each named after the most important Spanish painters of the 17-19th centuries: Goya entrance, Velazquez entrance, Murillo entrance, and next to each of these entrances you will see a sculpture of the painter the entrance is named after.

Prado museum is very large, so prepare to spend at least four hours there. Photography is allowed, but without flash, so you better bring some 400 or 800 speed film, because I promise you, you will want to take pictures. One of the unique features of this museum is that in a lot of the rooms you can buy a book on the particular painter or a period for 1€. Even though these books are rather small, they''re very good.

So now let’s start with the museum collection. Obviously this museum has the largest collection of Spanish painters, but when you enter, the whole first floor has very little of Spanish school. Here you will find icons dating back to the 12-13th centuries, followed by Italian Renaissance rooms with paintings by Mantegna, Rafael (a copy of "Transfiguration"), del Sarto, Veronese, Tintoretto, Bellini, four rooms of Titian’s paintings (Titian’s "Danae" is currently on loan to the National Gallery in London, where there is currently a large exhibit of Titian’s paintings that I also highly recommend). Then there is Spanish art with Gothic works by Bermejo, the mannerist style of Luis Morales, and even more so of El Greco’s paintings of apostles and portraits of nobility: here is "Santo Tomas" - his signature piece.

Continued in Part II

Cason del Buen Retiro is closed for restoration.

Phone: 91 330 28 00
Open: Tues–Sun 9am–7pm
Closed on Mondays, Jan 1, Good Friday, May 1, and Dec 25.
Prices: 3.01€–adults, 1.5€–students
Free: Sundays, May 18, Oct 12, and Dec 6. Always free for children and seniors (over 65).

(Continued from Part I)
But even more amazing are the rooms with paintings by Cranach, Durer (his "Adam and Eve" that you can compare to Cranach’s and then to the works of Renaissance masters), and I was especially and thoroughly amazed by the paintings of Bosch that are so rare in other museums’ collections. Hieronymus Van Aeken Bosch (1450-1516) (also called El Bosco in Spanish) was one of Felipe II’s favorite painters and his painting "The Garden of Early Delights" (1516) is probably the most interesting work you will find in the whole Prado museum. Why is that? It’s not only because of its subject –- the depiction of paradise and hell and everything in between, but mostly because of the manner that it is painted in, its colors, the way it is full of surrealistic images, and when you look at it, you cannot believe that this was painted in the 16th century and not by a contemporary of Salvador Dali.

On the second floor you encounter what you came here for: the Spanish masters. Large halls with Velazquez’s famous portraits of the little infanta so live that you think she is just waiting to step off from the painting and regal Felipe IV, his portraits of kings and regular people. Alongside in the gallery parallel to the rooms with Velazquez’s paintings are Ribera’s works, full of drama adapted by him from Caravaggio, and Murillo’s Madonnas and saints with this very recognizable Seville school of painting that has been copied from him in a lot of church paintings throughout Spain. Other rooms have the rare works by Zurbaran, Rubens (a huge collection of Rubens’ paintings –- truly remarkable), Van Dyck, Teniers, Rembrandt, Guetchino, Caravaggio, Reni, Tiepolo, Poussin, and all the way on the other side of the floor is what everybody comes to Madrid for -– Goya’s works from all periods of his life: portraits of the royalty on horses and without, the famous Majas for which he was very criticized, sketches for the tapestries in El Pardo, and the dark reaction to the horrors of the Napoleonic wars in many paintings, the most powerful of which are probably "Saturn Devouring One of His Sons" and "The 3rd of May in Madrid" showing execution of Spanish by the French troops.

Continued in Part III

Continued from Part II

The added bonus this time was the exhibit "Vermeer and the Dutch interior," which covers works of Vermeer, Borch, Dou, de Hooch, Maes, Metsu and Steen during the period of 1650-1675. Vermeer is probably the most famous of this group of painters, which is typically skipped by the visitors to most museums, but this particular exhibit has been put together with paintings from all over the world: New York, Washington D.C., Vienna, Amsterdam, Dresden, Paris, St Peterburg (Russia) and many other places -- Spain doesn’t own any of Vermeer’s paintings. The main subjects in all of the paintings are mainly women in their regular life –- sewing, dressing, writing, drawing, playing musical instruments -- and the play of the light and perspective is what draws us to these images. Eight out of 34 works painted by Vermeer in his lifetime are presented in Prado, with his "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" as the cover painting for the exhibit. The uniqueness of this exhibit is that you can compare the style of several painters side by side and see why Vermeer stands out from the rest of the group.

Currently on display (through May 25, 2003) is a temporary exhibit "Musical Analogies: Kandinsky and his contemporaries" in the basement, which shows works of Kandinsky, Kupka, Klee, Delaunay, von Jawlensky to name just a few, and the exhibit shows that music was the model of the abstract art development and influence of various methods in musical composition on the rhythm and color of their works.

Prices:
Permanent collection 4.80€–adults, 3€–students
Combined ticket for the permanent collection and temporary exhibit 6.60€–adult, 3.60€–student

If you are staying in Madrid just for a day, you have to visit Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. It is located across the street from Museo del Prado in the 18th century villa and considered the most important privately-assembled art collection in the world, which I really have to agree with.

The collection is truly enormous and it is best to start on the 2nd floor and work your way down to the basement -- this way you will start with the early Renaissance and follow the art through Baroque, Rococo, Realism to the 20th century modern. You can also the paintings of the founders of the museum, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza.

If you visit Prado first, this collection will be like a great addition to what you’ve just seen. You start with the Italian icons of the 14-15th centuries, then move on to the early Gothic paintings of Van Eyck, della Robbia’s beautiful porcelain statues. The collection of Dutch masters includes works by Memling, van Cleve, and Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry VIII. Next, we see the Italian Renaissance with works by Pietro della Francesca, Rafael, Corregio, Veronese, and Strozzi. Carpaccio’s "Young knight in a landscape" is considered a symbol of this museum and is shown on the cover of all the catalogs. The German school is represented by works of Durer and Cranach the Elder, the most beautiful of which is Cranach’s "Reclining nymph". In other rooms you will find paintings by Murillo, Tiepolo, Teniers, Brueghel, Van Dyck, 4 Rubens paintings the most interesting of which is "The toilet of Venus", Van Loo, Rembrandt’s "Self-portrait", Bronzino, and Titian’s "Portrait of Doge Francesco Venier". You can also see portraits by Holbein and views of Venice by Canaletto.

The first floor has a large collection of 17th-century Dutch paintings that show scenes of daily life, interiors, and landscapes including Metsu, de Hooch, and Teniers, which are really missing from Prado collection.

Continued in Part II

Paseo del Prado, 8

Phone: 91 369 01 51
Open: Tues–Sun 10am–7pm, closed on Mondays, May 1.
No photography allowed.

There is a large bookshop on the main floor to the right of the main entrance.

Continued from Part I

Also on the 1st floor there are several rooms of paintings from French school of the 17th century and British paintings from 18-19th centuries -- the most notable works are by Reynolds, Gainesborough, Fragonard, Watteau. More of 19th century is represented by Sargeant, Whistler, Delacroix, Goya, Corot, Constable, and Courbet. There is also a very impressive collection of impressionists and post-impressionists: Manet, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas ("Swaying Dancer" is probably the envy of any museum), Toulouse-Lautrec, Gaughin, Bonnard, Van Gogh, and Cezanne are all next door to the expressionism/avant-garde of Kandinsky, von Jawlensky, Goncharova, Larionov, Delaunay, Vlaminck, Braque, Kokoshka, and Dufy.

The main floor continues the various movements of the 20th century almost as a retrospective of the past century. It boasts such names as Mondrian, Leger, Picasso, Braque, Gris, Popova, Kupka, Rozanova, Udaltzova, Chashnik, Suetin, Lissitsky, Filonov, Glebova, Annenkov, Ernst, Klee, Chagall, Matisse, Miro, Pollock, Gorky, O’Keefe, Kooning, Dali, Tanguy, Giacometti, Magritte, and Francis Bacon. At the entrance to the collection on the main floor you can also see Tintoretto’s "Paradise," which looks like a miniature of the wall in Doge’s Palace.

The temporary exhibit that shares the floor with the modern art is "Ribera – The Pieta" (through May 11, 2003), which is free. This is not a large exhibit but it shows the paintings that influenced Ribera’s vision that are on loan here from the National Gallery in London, the Louvre, museums of Rome, Naples, Museo del Prado and led to the painting of his Pieta which belongs to the Museo Thyssen collection. Also here are Ribera’s sketches of Pieta from private collections.