What Did The Lover Think Of This?

 So today we went to the Thyssen art museum, to the National Library's museum, to the Archeological Museum, and then to the ABC Serrano shopping mall and then out for dinner. 

The three first things all involved, again, my purse going through the X-ray machines. I swear, as soon as I get back, I am going to call up a friendly health physicist and ask if I can get my purse tested. It will be, oh, so spectacularly ironic if it picked up a higher radiation dose in two weeks holidaying in Spain than it did in a year and a half working at a nuclear reactor, but I am willing to bet in euros that is the case. 

The Thyssen Art Museum picks up where the Prado and Reina Sofia left off; it has many of the same authors, including Goya (very little Joan Miro, though.) 

First, we saw the special exhibition on of Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and the Renaissance workshops. The second-tier Renaissance masters: not Leonardo, Raphael, or Michelangelo, Tintoretto or Titian, but Botticelli, Ghirlandaio (whom I hear of for the first time), Perugino, and Verocchio. Particularly fascinatingv was the room giving closeups of a particular painting under radiographic, ultraviolet, and materials analyses, showing how it had been corrected and repainted.

chernobylred , it has one Caravaggio that I noticed, the painting of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. It has a lovely collection of Max Ernst (my favourite was "33 girls in search of a white butterfly";  try to find all 33 girls and the butterfly. No, I don't know the answer.) As well, some lesser-known Picassos that support my thesis that they guy could draw well if he felt like it, some lovely Impressionists, some works by Kandinsky, Chagall, Picabia, even, I think, Malevich himself. 

One painting that made me stop was Eugene Delacroix's The Duke of Orleans Showing His Lover To The Duke of Burgundy (potentially NSFW):  I kept wondering why, and what the lover thought of this --- did she lie back passively, knowing there was no escape? Or was she actually an opportunistic woman in the style of Empress Catherine I (who rose from Polish peasant's wife to Empress of Russia through pretty much the definition of sleeping her way to the top, although she was brilliant as well)? Did she love the Duke of Orleans but wish he wouldn't do that? Did the Duke of Burgundy coerce him into doing it, or was it of his own volition? 

Thyssen also has a beautiful collection of Dutch Old Masters. The paintings of Frans Hals are particularly lovely. I liked the Dutch Renaissance; it seems somehow more peaceful in every way than the Italian one. 

(I should spend some time in Holland: peace, coffee shops, bicycles, logicians...)

I also saw a Vernet knowingly for the first time. The thing that popped into mind with my associative memory, was Sherlock Holmes saying, in one of the Russian TV series episodes which mixed and matched script from various stories actually, that his grandmother was related to Vernet. This amused me.

One thing I have to say for Thyssen --- their gift shop employs an amazing jeweller. There were several lines of jewelry based on famous paintings in the collection, and darn if I didn't want some of it. Alas, no, no frivolity for me. But le sigh.

The rest will be next post.

The Ancient Writers of Spain

 We stopped back at the hotel and decided to go to the Archeological Museum, and as the National Library is in the same building, and apparently my brother is already a fan of Spain's National Library, we will visit that as well.

The National Library's Museum entrance also featured a security scanner, and a receptionist who tried speaking to me in halting English before discovering to her relief that I understood Spanish pretty well.

So there was an exhibit on the Moriscos, the Moors in Spain who had been forced to convert or be exiled by the Christians after the conquest of Granada.

The exhibit was mostly books, and books in Arabic to boot, but I thoroughly (for once) read the Spanish texts above them. It's a library; you gotta read, right? Even though I am aware that I read Spanish much more slowly than English or Russian, and it frustrates me. But I learned some interesting things, like the fact that there were networks smuggling forbidden books around Morisco communities when all books in Arabic script were prohibited and many were destroyed --- even though many of those books were Spanish transliterated into Arabic script, the so-called 'aljamiados', as the Moors living in Andalusia gradually forgot how to speak Arabic fluently. The Toledo guide had pointed that out too, that at the time of the Reconquista, the Moors were not Arabic; they were not African; they were Spanish.

From the exhibit, we went to the display of the library museum proper. The history of writing across various languages (Baruch Hashem, their Hebrew was displayed right side up) including, cool, Phoenician. A display on Braille text and the writing boards used for that. A really neat display on old music recording and playback devices, which allowed you to listen to each of them. Antique typewriters that had only 22 letters for Spanish and were not QWERTY. Printing presses and their history, including Gutenberg typecases. A display of the bookbinding art, including gorgeous books that had won the National Bookbinding Competition in 1995 and 1996 (which supports my thesis that whatever you can possibly imagine, there are people who do it very very well, and there is a competition in it.) A 1989 Macintosh that looked hopelessly quaint. 

Fascinating.

The Archeological Museum is on the other side of the building, but there is no way through, so we had to go around.

The Museum was a little bit of a disappointment, because, alas, I've been to the British Museum and more than once. We did not find a replica of the caves at Altamira, which was what I had been hoping to see; we did see the Lady of Elx and the other Roman ruins (sorry, it seems that seeing Numancia has soured me forever from enthusiasm about Romans in Spain, which is no good). They had a lovely collection of Greek vases, as well as 17th and 18th century porcelain; some beautifully preserved gold coins of Greece, Rome, and Iberia; and some lovely Visigothic jewelry. But all in all, it was smaller than I had thought. Oh well, it was free, and I did learn something.

Land of Opportunidad

 While we were in the area, we went to check out the ABC Serrano mall that was advertised in the tourist materials we had gotten from the tour company on the first day. 

I have to say I was disappointed. Not by the prices; every single store in the mall is having 40-60% off sales. But still, there was hardly anyone there. I looked around for nice shoes; alas, the fashion this year is not to my taste, and those shoes that did look fairly nice had very thin, hard soles, and I have reached the age, and have walked enough miles and danced enough at rehearsals, that the comfort of a shoe is just as important as its appearance, so I just kept on walking in my Clarks. Somehow a mall during a recession, when the largest towers in Spain are standing empty because no one can swing their leasing fees, is just not as fun. The glyptodont and the Toledo knife may be the only things I will bring back.

We fled that most depressing of malls, and decided that we did not feel like grocery shopping, so we finally checked out the tapas bar restaurant a few metres from our hotel.

We both had the salad, and then I picked a filet of steak while my brother ended up getting fish, because he was not sure what boquerones were on the menu (they're little sardine-like fish.) Flipping through the menu, which was trying to be bilingual, we cracked up at the sight of "Raciones y Tapas" being translated as "Shares and Lids."

I snapped a photo, to find the waiter standing over my shoulder. So we got into a discussion with him as to what the rest of the world calls tapas --- 'tapas,' I do believe. So we told him about Canada, and about how much housing costs and what the minimum wage is for a waiter (he at first asked how much the weekly wage is for a normal person, and um, I can tell him mine, but I'm not a normal person. I told him how much my apartment was, too.)

He told us that he was from Colombia, and all his life he had been told to go to the U.S., it's the land of opportunity, but he could not make it to the U.S, while no one was mentioning going to Europe. So he had ended up in Europe, spent some time in Germany and Switzerland before spending the last fourteen years now in Spain. Having the same language did not help as much as we thought it did. He complimented me on my Castilian, by the way, which made me happy. So I told him about this being the second time I was in Spain, the first time having been in Soria, which, ironically, my mineral water was from (a drink was included, and I asked for water. In esprit d'escalier, I later thought of asking for wine instead, but by then it was too late.)

He was fun. And the food was pretty good, especially at the price. Even though this would be the first three-course meal with restaurant-sized plates I've eaten in...maybe two years, and oh gods I do not generally eat this much. 

So that is the end of today's stories so far.