Guns of Spain

Museum of the Civil Guard / Museo de la Guardia Civil
01/30/12 - Calle Guzmán el Bueno, 110

This obscure but diverting museum nestles within the headquarters of Spain's military-status police force. Be prepared to show a passport at the entrance. Once inside the compound's courtyard, you'll walk past a construction site, as well as live examples of military brass, to the museum entrance. Upstairs, hundreds of guns fill the first room of the collection (Sala de Armas): old revolvers, pistols, carbines, rocket-launchers, guns in the form of pens, pearl-handled guns, stiletto-guns, guns confiscated from terrorist groups, and tiny guns from the 1950s that might hide in a satin evening clutch. Not to mention hand grenades, machetes, swords and wavy-bladed daggers.  Looking ahead, the final room has a bicycle from 1914, built to suspend a German Mauser along its frame.

The Civil Guard was created in 1844 to protect travelers from bandits along Spain's wild mountain passes, especially in the southern parts of the country. 

Goya, "Assault of a Coach," 1786-87

The Civil Guard also broke up demonstrations, monitored poaching, and patrolled the borders and the coast. Its role grew in modern times to include foreign peace-keeping missions, anti-terrorism, intelligence, and many other duties. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Guard split its loyalties down the middle, when almost half supported the rebel forces under general Francisco Franco.

The tricorne hat of the Spanish Civil Guard

The second room presents the history of Civil Guard uniforms, with the help of life-size mannequins. 

Early uniforms.  The striped version was worn in Africa.

Finally, the third room contains miscellaneous objects.  Lining the walls, dozens of miniature dioramas dramatize historical scenes from the lives and deaths--in the line of duty--of the Civil Guard in Spain and the Spanish colonies.  An engraved brass plate describes each scene. For example: a group of Guards in "Equatorial Guinea" (Cameroon) encounters a huge snake; two officers are killed and mutilated in 19th c. Granada by a family of criminals; four officers are killed in Castilblanco when they try to break up an illegal demonstration (31 December 1931); officers are killed by E.T.A. terrorists at a traffic stop (7 June 1968).  The displays are meticulously crafted, down to the smallest fallen branch or piece of broken chair.  In this museum, amidst the weaponry and violence, children will have a field day.

Hours: M-F, 9:00 - 14:00.  Metro: Guzman el Bueno.

Heaven & Earth on Sunday: Goya, Roast Chicken, River

Goya Pantheon, The Church of San Antonio de la Florida
1/8/12 – Glorieta de San Antonio de la Florida, 5

One of Goya's angels

The artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), or simply Goya, is growing on me.  He painted the lovely ceiling in the Church of San Antonio de la Florida at the height of his creative powers, in 1798.

According to a pamphlet for sale (1 Euro, 60 pp., available in English), this riverside neighborhood of Madrid has a long history of devotion to St. Anthony of Padova, the Patron Saint of unmarried girls.  On his feast day June 13, maidens arrived at St. Anthony’s shrine to ask for a husband.  They dropped thirteen pins into the holy water and dipped their hand to see how many pins would stick to it.  The number foretold their suitors for the year.  One can see the holy water font where this activity once took place, in the vestibule of the Church of San Antonio.  The neoclassical-style building was a royal chapel until 1881, when it became a parish church.  To protect Goya’s frescoes, the church turned into a museum in 1929.  An identical church—for worship and yearly romantic divination—was built next door.  

Goya's tomb and his frescoes lie within this neoclassical church

Goya died in France, but his remains were transferred to San Antonio de la Florida in 1919 (mysteriously, his skull was missing).  Thus, in one visit, homage can be paid to both artist and his creation.  

The frescoes are remarkable for several reasons.  Some elements of Goya’s style prefigure Impressionism, not to mention Goya’s creepy series of Black Paintings in the Prado.  The highest point, the cupola, contains an earthly instead of a heavenly scene.  Goya depicts a story from St. Anthony’s life, when the Saint’s own father was wrongly accused of murder.  St. Anthony brings the corpse to life—a miracle—for questioning, and the dead man proclaims the father’s innocence.  Onlookers in the scene are dressed as Goya’s contemporaries, from beggars to gossiping ladies.  The luminous angels that decorate the vaults have been excoriated for their secular appearance—they might be beauties of Madrid high society, in sashes and diaphanous dresses. 

After admiring Goya, we stepped across the street to the venerable cider-and-chicken house, Casa Mingo, a fixture of the neighborhood since 1888.*  

Casa Mingo, side view

Casa Mingo serves its own fermented cider, along with spit-roasted chicken, in a bustling restaurant.  On a Sunday, try to arrive before 2 p.m., when the line for tables can spill out the door.  Son 1 was intrigued by the sparse occupational duties of the chicken guy—impale, stack, roast in flames, remove. Three chickens served the 5 of us. 

Casa Mingo dining room

Afterwards, a stroll back to the train station, along Madrid's Manzanares River, was just the ticket.   

 

Manzanares River

In winter, the banks are almost empty. A lone fisherman cast his line.

 

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*This expedition to Goya’s pantheon and Casa Mingo was first suggested to me by Kay, a long-time Madrid aficionada and Madison, Wisconsin resident.

Consider the Bull

Bullfighting Museum / Museo Taurino

10/28/11 - Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas

Early morning is brisk in late October.  By noon, sun warms the stands of Madrid's world famous bull ring, the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas.  It's a beauty, this stadium built in 1929, with Moorish arches and hand-painted tiles.

Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas

In the world of spectacle, things haven’t changed much since Roman times.  Commoners sit in concrete rows in “sun” or “shade”; corporate interests fill red padded benches; the King of Spain graces a royal box (without his vegetarian Queen, who refuses to attend, we’re told).  The ring is sandy, and strewn with beer bottles and trash left over from a Cold Play concert two nights ago.  

Standing in the famous Plaza de Toros

Entrance to the "enfermeria"

Our interlocutor for the guided Tauro Tour (in Spanish and English, 7€) informed us that only four people in 80 years have been killed here by bulls.  Wounded toreros (or toreadors) are quickly attended to by “the two best surgeons and seven best doctors in Spain,” with operating rooms just inside the main gate.  In 80 years, only one bull fought so bravely that spectators demanded an official pardon, and the lucky animal left the ring alive.  Dead bulls—there are 6 per corrida when the season’s in full swing—are butchered, and their meat is sold for charity.

Tourists being toreros. Cape weighs 8-10 kilos

The Bullfighting Museum (free) complements the tour.  Colorful posters, and paintings of the most famous toreros from the seventeenth century to the present, line the walls.  The torero Manuel Domínguez (1816-1886) went by the name of “Desperdicios,” translated as “Worthless Waste.”  One story says his eye was poked out by a bull and left dangling.  With macho aplomb he pulled it free and tossed it to the ground, claiming it was "just waste."  A few of the best bulls on record stare down from their mounts, bulls-eyes intact, reproachful.  

‘My God! he’s a lovely boy,’ Brett said. ‘And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn.’  (Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1927)

The torero’s traditional, bedazzled “suit of lights” is well represented: capes with embroidered violets, skin-tight capris with sequins, jackets with tassels and gold.  We can view the blood-stained breeches of the great matador Manolete (1917-1947), one of four human deaths at Las Ventas, in the afternoon, at the horns of a fierce bull named Islero.  

The first female toreador seen at Las Ventas, Juanita Cruz is a curiosity: born in Madrid the same year as Manolete, she was granted special permission to perform in major arenas.  But that’s all we learn from the Bullfighting Museum.  Her “suit of lights” looks like an early prototype for the dreaded “skort” one finds now in trendy outdoor clothing catalogues.  Later banned from bullfighting by General Franco, Juanita Cruz moved to Mexico, where she performed under the name “La Reina del Toreo.”  Where is Juanita’s image, I ask you, curators of the Bullfighting Museum?  I had to seek out other sources. 

Juanita Cruz, "La Reina del Toreo"

Forty etchings by Goya on bullfight themes (1801-15) fill one room, where a short video also presents highlights of the ring, interspersed with glimpses of bully art by Spanish notables—Picasso, Dalí, Goya, Miró, and a few contemporary artists.

Bullfighting was just banned in Catalonia—the last fight ever in Barcelona took place September 25, 2011. Many will mourn the passing of a tradition, its rituals and pageantry.  Will Madrid see the light, and follow suit? 

The Face of a Castrato, the Bite of Fiery Serpents

The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando / Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

10/25/11 - Alcalá, 13
The face on the wall of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts tells a story.  That much is evident at first glance.  Red lips, beauty mark à la Cindy Crawford, dark eyes gazing with feminine allure directly at the viewer.  The c.1750-52 portrait by Italian artist Jacopo Amigoni depicts “Carlo Broschi, called Farinelli”—rock-star castrato of eighteenth century Europe.  The celebrated voice of Farinelli was credited with curing the melancholia of Spain’s King Phillip V.  The singer came to Madrid for a gig and spent over two decades here as a royal favorite (1737-1759), organizing operas and court spectacles, and singing duets with music-crazed members of the royal family.  Elsewhere in the museum, two paintings capture the elaborate stage sets of Farinelli’s operatic productions.  

Portrait of Farinelli, c. 1750-52

The Royal Academy houses three floors of paintings and sculpture, mostly Spanish, Italian and Flemish from the XV to the XX centuries.  Among them one finds a stunning “Last Supper” (Tintoretto); several canvases by a master of human flesh (Peter Paul Rubens); a portrait of King Carlos III (Andres de la Calleja) that is the spitting image of Rubalcaba, candidate for President of Spain in next month’s election; a portrait of Barbara de Braganza (M. Van Loo), whose diamond-studded hair-do can’t hide her double chin; an exciting view of Mount Vesuvius erupting (Antonio Carnicero) while a lone artist calmly sketches in the foreground and others look on in wonder; and a small, creepy painting by Alessandro Magnasco, showing “A Community of Capucin Friars” as they participate in a public act of self-punishment, or capitulo de culpas.

Excellent descriptive labels in both Spanish and English accompany the majority of works.  I would have been most grateful, though, for a label on Jose Leonardo’s shudder-worthy scenario of my nightmares: “The Metal Serpent” (NOT pictured), in which writhing snakes bite half-naked people with tenacious glee.*

Guiseppe Arcimboldo, "The Spring"

Numerous works by Goya in the collection prove why it’s not a good idea to start with his Black Paintings and work backwards from there (see my earlier visit to the Prado Museum).  I especially enjoyed the self-portrait, the only image of Goya wearing his notorious hat with candles, allowing him to paint into the dusky twilight hours.  

Finally, a visit to the Royal Academy is not complete without a careful look at Guiseppe Arcimboldo’s “The Spring,” c. 1563.  The only Arcimboldo painting in Spain, it’s a gorgeous riot of flowers and vegetables, forming the profile of a smiling man.  Lettuce leaves for shoulders, rose cheeks, and petal skin.  His eye’s a violet, sweet of Madrid. 

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*It’s a scene from the Old Testament, Numbers 21, I later learned.  The Israelites, frustrated by their long march in the desert, started to “murmur” amongst themselves.  God punished this act of murmuring with flying fiery serpents.  Then Moses revived the victims with a metal serpent.  Yes, it all makes sense in the end.

The Collectors: Cerralbo Museum & Museum Lázaro Galdiano

10/04/11, 10/05/11

In the U.S. today, many of us feel overwhelmed by inanimate objects.  Witness the scolding television show Clean Sweep, or the horror stories of Hoarding: Buried Alive.  We’ve developed a narrative of simplification, exhorting us to jettison clothes we haven’t worn in the past year, to discard one item for every new thing we bring into our home, to re-purpose the attic storage space as a meditation room.  The modern aesthetic craves clean lines, and I hasten to agree in theory—it’s much easier to dust an empty sideboard.

Then again, it’s easy to accumulate when you have servants to do the dusting for you.  The seventeenth Marqués of Cerralbo, don Enrique de Aguilera (1845-1922) and the financier/publisher/art critic José Lázaro Galdiano (1862-1947) were both avid collectors of fine objects: paintings, books, arms and armor, ceramics, bronzes, antiquities…the list is long.  The aristocrat Cerralbo inherited wealth, while Galdiano made it and then married into more.  Each man sported the whiskers of a Victorian gentleman, built a mansion in Madrid around the turn of the twentieth century to hold his treasures, and later gave everything to the nation of Spain. 

The Marques of Cerralbo

The Cerralbo Museum (calle de Ventura Rodríguez, 17) preserves the original decor of the 1893 mansion as it looked in Cerralbo’s day.  In his bedroom, we can see the stylish chair in which Cerralbo expired in 1922.  The main staircase was built to impress, and it does.  The art collections are displayed throughout the rooms and hallways, but the function of each room, from billiard to ballroom, is clear.  The moviemaking team of Merchant and Ivory could begin filming a period drama tomorrow.  Lovely chandeliers of Venetian Murano glass adorn the ballroom and several other living spaces.  Their pastel colors, delicate flowers and airy glitter provide visual relief from the heavy, ornate furniture and draperies.  We get a peek at a powder room just off the ballroom, and another bathroom with a massive marble bathtub, a rare amenity for the time. There is no spigot, and one wonders how the hot water was provided.  (In fact, the only glaring omission from this museum is the servants’ quarters—the folks responsible for all that dusting).

Lazaro Galdiano

By contrast, the Museum Lázaro Galdiano (calle Serrano, 122) has remodeled the former living spaces of the 1903 building into four floors of galleries.  Like Cerralbo, Galdiano collected fine examples of just about everything.  From a church that was being remodeled—much to Galdiano’s dismay—he rescued the towering XV c. choir stall seat of the Count of Urgell, carved in oak and walnut.  There are paintings from the XV to the XIX century, including the artists Goya, El Greco, Velazquez, Bosch, Boltraffio (from the Milanese circle of Da Vinci), and Brueghel the Younger.  Even British artists make an appearance: Lely, Reynolds, Romney, Stuart and Constable.  Boltraffio’s Young Christ (1490-95), pictured below, has a haunted expression, and is painted in a style that closely resembles Da Vinci’s.  I was surprised to find here Brueghel’s mid-XVII c. painting The Animals Entering Noah’s Ark—a reproduction of this very picture has been thumbtacked to my garage wall in Wisconsin for years. 

Young Christ (1490-95)

After his wife Paula Florido died, Galdiano continued to travel the world, collecting and exhibiting his finds.  He lived in Paris and New York following the Spanish Civil War, and returned to Madrid in 1945.  On the top floor of the museum is a collection of rare textile fragments, some from as early as XIV c. (Granada), showing the influence of Moorish design. On the ground floor we can gawk at Paula’s jewels.  Her modern-looking lariat necklace by Cartier, with two huge diamonds, is the cat’s meow.  I’d gladly dust it. 

The Velvet Toilet: Romanticism in High Gear

Museum of Romanticism

The Museum of Romanticism / 
Museo del Romanticismo
09/03/11 - Calle de San Mateo, 13
While the Professor and progeny quietly slumbered (compensating for a 2 a.m. computer-screen kick-off of the TCU Horned Frogs v. the Baylor University Bears), I slipped out into the drizzling morning and headed south, to the grand, 18th-century mansion that houses the Museum of Romanticism. 

In my earlier life I was intimate with the English, Polish and Russian literary outcroppings of the Romantic Movement, and the prospect of a foray into Spanish Romanticism made me giddy with excitement.  Along the way I once again marveled at the ubiquity of contemporary fashion.  The young Spanish men ambling up Fuencarral Street in plaid Bermudas and graphic t-shirts easily could have been mistaken for undergraduates back home at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  The phenomenon of “Romanticism”—a cultural, literary, and intellectual movement of the nineteenth century—seems to have undergone a similar march across the continents. 

I highly recommend the booklet that visitors can borrow (with the 3 Euro price of admission).  It provides a competent summary of the main tenets of Romanticism, as well as a description of the paintings and objects in each room of the museum. According to the summary, Spanish Romanticism coincided with the reign of Queen Isabel II, 1833-68.  This places the Spanish movement a bit later on the continuum than its counterparts in other European countries (the roots of literary romanticism go back to the eighteenth century, in reaction to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution; even Russian writers were dabbling in romantic poetry and prose by the early 1820s).  Such ruminations are beside the point. A walk through the museum is enough to evoke a sensibility of romanticism, an approach to museum-going that true romantics can applaud.

A King's toilet

The gorgeous rooms (ante, drawing, ball, dining, smoking, billiards, children’s, study, music, bed and chapel) contain period furniture and decorative objects, including ceramics, jewelry, fans, toys, clocks, musical instruments, and the pièce de résistance: King Fernando VII’s lavatory—a huge toilet made of mahogany and velvet (pictured).  Among the children’s toys are tiny ivory miniatures no child today would be allowed to touch, with a chess table and game pieces smaller than black ants.  In the smoking room I could picture Lord Byron wearing his oriental turban, reclining on the divan against the paisley wallpaper, recounting his conquests of the married ladies of Seville.*   Indeed, the final exhibit, a scale model of the mansion, has tiny windows through which one can see virtual images of people dining, dancing, and preparing to leave in a coach. (You can see the entire museum in 5 minutes by visiting this page).

Paintings include Goya’s “Saint Gregory the Great;” formal portraits of Isabel II (only three years old when she ascended the throne) and other dignitaries; landscapes; miniatures; and examples of the Andalusian “Costumbrista” school of painting.  These paintings are often set in taverns, inns, or mountain passes, and idealize smugglers, stage coach robbers, and folk in regional Spanish dress.  Two interesting paintings by Leonardo Alenza mock the romantic penchant to idealize suicide: “Satire of the Romantic Suicide,” and “Satire of the Romantic Lover’s Suicide,” both c. 1839.

The Great Ballroom is awash in pink damask.  At a glance, I confirmed that the set of chairs we inherited from the Professor’s grandmother demonstrated this exact sensibility, as filtered through American post-WWII enthusiasm for Old Europe.  Without their ballroom, those chairs in our house never reached the sublime.  Resisting translation, they went to Goodwill, to die or be reborn.

*Byron bragged to his own mother about his encounters with Spanish ladies in a letter sent from Gibraltar dated August 11, 1809.  “I beg leave to observe that Intrigue here is the business of life, when a woman marries she throws off all restraint, but I believe their conduct is chaste enough before.”  In Spain in Mind: An Anthology, ed. Alice Leccese Powers, NY: Vintage, 2007, 28.

The Creep Factor - Selected Works at the Prado

The Prado Museum / Museo del Prado
08/06/11 - Calle Ruiz de Alarcón, 23

With the Professor, S1 and S2 in tow, we opted for tapas rather than dinner, including: Goya’s Black Paintings, a few rooms of El Grecos, and Bosch’s utterly insane painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.  In other words, enough to live on for several weeks.

El Greco.  Let me unleash this sacrilegious thought right away.  As a child of a border town (San Diego), El Greco’s color schemes remind me of the black velvet paintings hawked in Tijuana tourist shops of the 1970s.  Even with our unformed and barely critical minds we derided those velvet paintings as tacky; for a brief moment in the 1990s they may have earned a certain ironic cachet.  But what I love about El Greco is his color, unlike anything being done at the time.  A black velvet El Greco would make my day.*

Outside the Prado: Goya the artist, Ritz the hotel

Goya. Between 1819 and 1823, he filled a large room of his house with dark, dark images meant only for his own perusal.  The 14 paintings were discovered after Goya’s death, painted directly onto the walls. The house and its contents then changed hands several times.  One owner tried to auction off the paintings in the 1870s, but found no buyers.  The paintings were finally donated to the Prado, and were transferred to canvas.  For S1 and S2, “Saturn Devouring His Son” is now seared into their brains.  And that is what art is all about.

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.  Thank you, reference source of the lazy and undisciplined, Wikipedia: “…in no other painting does he achieve such complexity of meaning or such vivid imagery….20th-century art historians are divided as to whether the triptych's central panel is a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost.”  Hieronymus, what more can 21^st-century art historians say? 

*Not so sacrilegious after all.  From Wikipedia entry on “Black Velvet Painting,” for what it’s worth: “Black velvet paintings originate in ancient Kashmir, the homeland of the fabric. These original paintings were generally religious and portrayed the icons of the Caucasus region which were painted by Russian Orthodox priests.  Marco Polo and others introduced black velvet paintings to Western Europe, and some of these early works still hang in the Vatican Museums.” Accessed 19 August 2011.