Dec. 20, 2014
What a wonderful day to begin exploration of Madrid. First stop, The Reina Sofía National Art Centre. We came here specifically to see som Picasso’s and Dail’s paintings. There is much work from the Surrealism period and covers artwork from 1930’s through 1980’s. As I expected some of it was just bizarre to me personally. It was as if all these artist friends tried to out wired each other for a certain time period.
Onto our next stop the Prado Museum which was just blocks from Sofia.
However unlike Sofia this museum is full of European art dating back to the 12th century, stunning oil paintings lined the walls. We viewed much work by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez, El Greco, Titian, Peter Paul Rubens and Hieronymus Bosch are some of the highlights of the collection. No photos are allowed to be taken inside the Prado!
Two pieces that stood out to me were: Las Meninas, as We have statues of it given to us as a gift years ago. To see painting was stunning. We are NOT allowed to take photos so theses both came off the website of the museum.
Second stand out was The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch. To me it’s a painting before its time. It was painted sometime between 1490 and 1510. It is a 3 panel painting done with the 2 side ones being shutters. The left shutter is Adam and Eve, the middle has a lot of nudity, animals, fruits, etc and the right shutter then displays hell or what happens after adultery etc. they say it shows what happens with life’s temptations. The reason it stood out to me was because it seems ahead of its time. It is more Salvador Dali like than something done in 1490-1510!
timistravels 