EUROPE FOR FREE : CITY: SECTION :
sometimes free
Any day on which
entrance to a normally pricey sight is free is never a secret. Expect
a crush of visitors, especially of schools on class trips and other cash-strapped
groups. Sure you get in for free, but the crowds may not make it worth
your while. At the very least, try to show up when the doors open so you
can be at the head of the surging masses. Caveat emptor.
Note that,
officially, these days of free admission are for EU citizens only, but
the ticket booths rarely seem to enforce this policy and just let everyone
glide in for free.
FREE
ON WEDNESDAY
Palacio
Real
Built in 1764 on the site of the immolated Alcazar, Madrid's 3,000-room
Royal Palace contains the usual hyper-luxurious kingly appointments and
furnishings, frescoes by Tiepolo, a pretty wicked Arms and Armour collection
(Charles V's marauding troops kitted out in these gigs), and a genuinely
interesting historic pharamacy. And hey, if you're here at noon on the
first Wednesday to the month you get to the see the changing of the guard
in the long, colonnated courtyard.
Monasterio
de las Descalzas Reales
Felipe II's sister Juana de Austria (already widowed of Prince Don Juan
of Portugal by the time she was but 19 years old) was in some ways as
pious as her brother, and she founded this nunnery for the Poor Clares
in the 1500s. However, this was no harsh convent for the brides of Christ,
but rather a sort of religious retreat for the daughters of nobility where
they could spend time safely squirreled away from the wiles of men until
their fathers could seal the deal on whom they would marry. At least at
this "Monastery of the Barefoot Royals" they had a surfeit of tapestries,
frescoes, and a nice variety of art to admire while they awaited their
nuptial fates, including canvases by Titian, Breughel the Elder, and Rubens.
You, too, can admire them on the requisite guided tours, provided you
do so quickly (the guides insist upon taking everyone through at a dead
trot).
Museo Lázaro
Galdiano
The early 20th century mansion of this author and financial guru is now
open to the public, so we can all admire his taste in medieval silversmithy
and carved ivories, and paintings by Goya, Ribera, El Greco, Zubar?n,
Tiepolo, Constable, Gainsborough, Murillo, and even one bona fide Leonardo
da Vinci.
Panteón de
Goya (Goya's Tomb)
Francesco de Goya decorated this chapel in 1797 with scenes from the Life
of St. Anthony (populated, of course, by members of the contemporary Spanish
court). The great, rather disturbed 18th century Spanish genius was later
buried here (or at least his body was, Bordeaux, where he died, has managed
to hold on to his head).
Museo
Municipal
In a former poorhouse with an elaborate Churrigueresque (rococo) facade,
this museum traces the history of the city of Madrid (conveniently, it's
got some Roman mosaics in the basement). Frankly, it's probably most interesting
to true history buffs, though the scale models of the city at different
eras do help one understand how Madrid developed into the overly-sprawling
urban center it has now become.
FREE
ON SATURDAY AFTER 2:30PM
Museo
del Prado
One of the world's greatest painting galleries, easily up there with the
Louvre, Uffizi, London's National Gallery, Vatican, or Metropolitan?just
not as well known (largely due to Spain's largely falling off the tourism
radar during the decades of Franco's rule). It covers art from the 12th
through the 18th centuries, strongest, as you might imagine, on Spanish
masters, though there are also excellent works by Titian, D?rer, Rubens,
and Tintoretto.
Even the Prado's
second most famous painting is one of several on display by Hieronymus
Bosch ("El Bosco"), the delirious and disturbing Garden of Earthly
Delights which many people liken to a 14th century forerunner to
surrealism (it's not, as Surrealism was pointedly anti-symbolic, and Bosch's
work is entirely interpretative of Catholic symbolism, but these are just
art theory semantics; sufficeth to say that these are works even Dal?
would probably look at and say "That's really warped, man!").
But on to the Spaniards.
There are plenty by the Caravaggiesque masters Zubar?n, master of flickering
candlelight, and Jose Ribera, master of wrinkly-browed St. Jeromes,
as well as by Murillo and El Greco, who was a Greek (where he was steeped
in Christian Orthodoxy) who came to Spain via Florence (where he picked
up Mannerism's wispy, twisty figures) and Venice (where he discovered
Titian's color palette), but after he settled in Toledo (where he mixed
it all together into an instantly recognizable and unique late Renaissance
style) became sort of an honorary Spaniard.
The gaggles of Goyas
(1746-1828)—there are more than 100—trace his long, slow decent into a depressed
madness, from his early scenes of pastel-cheeked youth frolicking and
laughing in bucolic landscapes (Parasol) and his stint as a court
painter (Family of Charles VI) to a stretch when he painted controversial
(the famed Clothed Maja and Naked Maja), often politically-charged
works (Third of May, 1808: Execution) in a harsher style, and
his late "Black Paintings" period, a series of somber, bloody, breathless
paintings (check out Jupiter ripping his son's head off with his teeth)
that he painted on the walls of his house and which are just crying out
for some serious couch time with a good therapist. (Instead, he moved
to Bordeaux, where at least judging by The Milkmaid of Bordeaux,
he managed to find a happier life in his final years.)
But pride of place
in the Prado goes to the works of Diego Velázquez, most especially Las
Meninas, a courtly portrait group disarming in its intimacy and the
little tricks the artist uses to draw us in (or rather, to project the
painting's space out into our reality). It's painted as a sort-of backwards
scene: there's a crowd of courtiers and nobles?including the chil-princess
Infanta Margherita, a court dwarf, and a sleepy dog?gathered around Velazquez,
who stands in front of an easel, staring out at us as he decides what
to do next. If you look at the mirror on the far wall of the painting,
reflected in it are two ghostly figures: that's the King and Queen, whose
portrait Velazquez is supposedly painting, and, given the composition
of the whole scene, who must be standing there right at your elbow. The
painting is hung just at the right level in a rooms custom-built for it
so as to make the room we're standing in appear to continue into the painting's
space.
Centro
de Arte Reina Sof?a
Madrid's modern art museum has the usual mix of sometimes intriguing,
sometimes whimsical, often ridiculous and pointlessly self-important art
from the last half of the 20th century, as well as a cache of mediocre
works by Dalí, Mir?, and Juan Gris, but it draws the crowds for
Picasso's masterpiece Guernica, a vast and disturbing artistic
condemnation of the terrible 1937 massacre when Generalissimo Franco invited
his buddy Hitler to test his luftwaffe bombers by leveling this Basque
town during Spain's bloody Civil War. Anyone accustomed to scoffing at
Picasso's style as child-like will come away with a whole new respect
for just how powerful his style could be. The Guernica room is
also full of some of the many studies and sketches Picasso did for the
work, offering a unique insight into his artistic process.
Museo
Archeológico Nacional
Madrid's underrated archaeological museum includes artifacts from prehistory
through the Middle Ages, largely Iberian but with some Greek and Egyptian
stuff thrown in for good measure. There's also a slightly cheesy mock-up
of the Caves of Altamira and their 15,000-year-old paintings.
FREE
ON SUNDAY
Museo del Prado
(See above).
Museo de
Am?rica
Lest we forget that the Spanish were the first conquistadores of North,
Central, and South America, these rich ethnographic collections of pre-Columbian
(and Filipino) artifacts remind us of how wonderful, advanced, and aesthetically
diverse were those cultures that the great European explorers of the 16th
and 17th centuries systematically plundered, looted, and robbed. To the
museum's credit it goes to great pains to try and reveal and recreate
a true sense the cultures, lifestyles, and vanished societies that produced
these objects.
Museo de
Artes Decorativas
A vast survey of Spanish tastes in interior d?cor and objets d'art from
the 15th through the 19th centuries (though five whole floors of ornate
candlesticks and fancy furnishings can get to be a bit much).
Museo Sorolla
He wasn't the greatest of Spanish painters, but Valencian Joaquiin Sorolla
(1863-1923) produced some fine canvases, many preserved here (alongside
his prodigious ceramics collection) in the house-cum-studio he live din
during his final 11 years.
Museo Rom?ntico
Not as romantic as it sounds, but rather Romantic, a hodgepodge of antique
furnishings, tchochkies, and Goyas cobbled together according to the aesthetics
of the late 19th century.
Museo Municipal
(See above). |