Madrid. THE GREAT MUSEUMS OF THE SPANISH CAPITAL

We conclude our visit to Madrid with a tour of the city's great museums.

by Fabio Massimo Penna

We had concluded the previous article on Madrid with a quick visit to the Prado Museum. In the haste we had neglected to admire the works of an artist who in the exhibition halls of Madrid is the master, Diego Velazquez. Let's go back inside and fix our mistake. Unmissable is the vast Las meninas,a work that realizes the great dream of the Spanish Baroque: to incorporate the viewer in the work, integrate it into the painting. From the painting the self-portrait of the Seville genius, who has effigy in the act of painting, stares intently as if we were the subject of his canvas. A mirror in the background of the work warns us, however, that the artist is portraying the king and queen, Philip IV and Marianna of Austria. This test of virtuosity is based on two pictorial gimmicks: the call to question of the concerns and the game of mirrors (reminiscent of that of Jan Van Eyck in The Arnolfini spouses). The viewer thus feels at the center of the work surrounded by the painter, the infant Margarita with his bridesmaids, a deformed dwarf and a dog. The Prado offers us another test of the Seville's technical mastery, The Spinners (the Fable of Aracne). Here Velazquez plays with the gimmick of the painting in the picture. In a textile workshop, some spinners can be seen in the foreground at work with a tapestry in the background on which Aracne is depicted showing Minerva a canvas with the rapture of Europa. The weaver, who had dared to challenge the goddess, is transformed into a spider. We pay our respects to what is, together with Pablo Picasso, the greatest Spanish painter in history we abandon the Prado and go to another treasure chest of jewels, the Reina Sofia Art Center.

Here we meet the whimsical genius of surrealism Salvador Dali. Some of the works preserved at reina Sofia belong to a phase in which the delirious dreamlike dimension had not yet taken over and the artist of Figueras showed a classicism that captured everyday reality. Favorite subject is sister Ana Maria, preferably taken from behind as in Young Woman Sitting in which the girl stands out on a landscape of houses with the wide neckline of the robe showing youthful and inviting shoulders. Of great sensuality is also the young figure overlooking a sea expanse of Girl at the window. At Reina Sofia, Dali's surrealist season is represented by The Great Masturbator in which the dreamlike visionary reaches its maximum expression with a huge profile face resting on the nose that stands out like a building and seems to kiss a gigantic cricket. From the face come the close-up of a woman and the lower part of a man's body. As often in Dali, symbolism refers to erotic appeals but also to death.

A room of its own. Pablo Picasso's masterpiece Guernica deserves to be in a separate room where the large canvas stands out covering a wall and enchanting the admired visitor whose gaze is lost among the agitated figures of the huge canvas. The work depicts the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica by German aircraft during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso abandons every realistic note and embodies his moral denunciation in the face of such ruthless brutality with images of deformed and twisted figures, faces unnaturally disconcerted by expressionistic attitudes of intense pain. Broken shreds of bodies, animals imbittered and upset, faces altered by the turmoil piled confusedly in a set to which a use of color at the edge of monochrome, played on the alternation of grays, blacks and whites, gives an extraordinary dramatic power.

Leaving the Reina Sofia we move to another extraordinary exhibition center, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum,home to more than eight hundred artistic masterpieces. Let's start with an Italian artist of the late Renaissance, Bramantino (Bartolomeo Suardi) with his Christ a man of pain in which the forms of Jesus are defined by an incisive graphic line that gives the body the consistency of a diamond while the dominant bruised colors give the painting an intense and moving pathetic note. Also notable is the work of Albrecht Durer Christ among the doctors in which, inspired by Leonardo's studies of the motions of the soul, he paints a Jesus with an imber and graceful face to which contrast the heads of scholars ranging from the grotesque and monstrous to the senile to the malevolent face. Among the jewels of the museum is the absolute masterpiece of Jacopo Bassano (Jacopo Da Ponte) The sowing of wheat that lowers the tale of the Sower's Gospels into an earthly and human dimension with a pastoral scene that represents a meal of peasants after the heavy work of the fields. In the Saint Catherine of Alexandria of Caravaggio the figure of the saint emerges from the shadow of the black background surrounded by the symbols of martyrdom, the wheel, the sword and the palm tree. The face of the saint resembles that of Judith in The Beheading of Holofernes. A testament to the extraordinary success of the invetriated terracottas of the Della Robbia workshop (in which the figures of Luca and Andrea stand out) is Luca Della Robbia's San Augustin (St. Augustine). Della Robbia's masterpieces achieved, thanks to the use of a luminous enamel, an extraordinary translucent effect, confirmed by this glassed-out terracotta surrounded by a polychrome feline of fruits and vegetables. The portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Domenico Ghirlandaio demonstrates the influence of Flemish art, from which a great attention to detail descends, on the Italian painter. The work presents the girl of richly dressed profile and complicated hair hairstyle, rendered with love for detail, while in an essential architectural frame are collected some personal objects.