Like shoppers at the January sales, a small group of tourists was already waiting for the doors to open, visibly excited at the prospect of all that art, and I joined the queue and tried not to worry. ‘What will you say when you see him?’ I had been suppressing Freja’s question, yet I remained fuzzy-headed about the answer, with only a jumble of apologies and justifications in mind. Along with self-reproach, resentment lurked too, that the holiday — potentially our last holiday — had been hijacked by Albie’s disappearance. Not a word from him, not one word! Did he want us to worry? Clearly he did, but would it really have hurt him to pick up the phone? Did he really care so little for our peace of mind? The voice in my head was becoming increasingly indignant, and it was vital that I stay calm and conciliatory. In an attempt to find some repose, I shuffled into the Prado to settle a question that had been troubling me for some time.
157. the garden of earthly delights‘Is it Prah-do or Pray-doh?’ I asked the lady at the ticket desk. I’d been alternating the two in my head, and was pleased to confirm that it was the former. ‘Prah-do,’ I said to myself, trying it out. ‘Prah-do. Prah-do.’
Immediately, I could tell this museum was something special. Here was Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a picture that I’d been enthralled by as a child for its lunatic detail. In the flesh, it was as much an object as a painting, a large wooden box that unfolded to reveal the painting and called to mind the gatefold album sleeves of certain progressive rock bands that I’d enjoyed in the 1970s. Here, on the left panel, were Adam and Eve, so vivid and sharp that they might have been painted yesterday, and here was heaven, populated by innumerable nude figures, pot-bellied like children, clambering over giant strawberries or riding on the backs of finches, and here was hell on the right, perverse and nightmarish, lit by bonfires on which those same tiny pot-bellied figures were the fuel. A sword embedded in a neck, a feather quill between disembodied ears, a sinister giant, fused with a pig, fused with a tree. A non-academic word, I know, but it was ‘trippy’, the kind of thrillingly horrible picture that a teenage boy would love and I hoped that, once he’d accepted my apology, Albie and I would return this way and absorb all the psychedelic detail.
No time now. I headed upstairs past El Grecos and Riberas to a spectacular room, a startling collection of portraits of moustachioed aristocrats, the Hapsburgs painted by Velázquez. One face recurred throughout, lantern-jawed and moist-lipped, here as a self-conscious, pink-cheeked teenage prince in brand new armour, here dressed absurdly as a fancy-dress hunter, now a sad, spaniel-faced monarch in late middle age. I wondered how he’d responded to the paintings, if Philip IV had squirmed the way we all do when we catch sight of our true likeness. ‘I wonder, Signor Diego, if there’s any way to make my chin a little smaller?’
These portraits were extraordinary enough, but dominating the whole room was a painting the like of which I’d never seen before, of a small girl, perhaps four or five years old, encased in a stiff satin dress as wide as a table at the hips, very strange on a child. Las Meninas, it was called, which means The Maids of Honour, and sure enough the princess was surrounded by courtiers, a nun, a finely dressed female dwarf and a small boy, or perhaps he was another dwarf, prodding a dog with his foot. To the left, a painter with a comically Spanish moustache — a likeness, I supposed, of Velázquez himself — stood in front of a huge canvas, facing out as if he was painting not the little girl but the viewer, specifically me, Douglas Timothy Petersen, the illusion so convincing that I wanted to crane around the canvas to see what he’d made of my nose. A mirror on the back wall showed two other figures, the girl’s parents I guessed, Mariana and Philip IV, the large-chinned gentleman on the wall to my left. Despite being distant and blurred, it seemed that they were the true subject of the artist’s portrait, but nevertheless the artist, the little girl, the female dwarf all seemed to stare out of the painting at me with such level intensity that I began to feel rather self-conscious, and confused, too, as to how a painting could have so many subjects: the little princess, the ladies in waiting, the artist, the royal couple, and me. It was as disorientating as the moment when you step between two mirrors and see infinite versions of yourself stretching into, well, infinity. Clearly there was ‘a lot going on’ in this painting too, and I’d return with Albie soon.
