The Writing Fellow

Reflections on a journey through the galleries and behind the scenes at Madrid's Prado Museum

- by John Banville

One summer in the prelapsarian 1960s, I forsook the isles of Greece in favour of Ibiza, which I expected to be as unspoilt and austerely delightful as my beloved Mykonos. The first thing that met my eye, however, when I got off the bus in the resort town of San Antonio, was a sign over a cafe offering me 'Tea Like Mum Makes It'. Oh, dear, I thought. The island was a tourist trap but also a haven for international idlers, crooks and conmen; by the time I learnt that, I was long gone.

I fled by ferry to Barcelona and travelled onwards by rail, on the Talgo – which still runs, though at a faster pace these days. Through the afternoon we chugged up the long incline to the tawny central plateau, and were comfortably late getting in. Can there be anything more exciting, especially when one is young, than to arrive by train, at dusk, in the heart of a great city?

In truth, I did not expect greatness of Madrid. Given the historical resonances between Ireland and Spain in the 1960s – unbending Catholicism, recent internecine strife, a seemingly immortal head of state – I had anticipated a country with its gaze fixed resolutely upon past greatnesses. What surprised and impressed me, however, was the sombre Bourbon stateliness of the city, the beauty of its pale palaces and grand townhouses and broad, immensely broad, boulevards.

And there was the Prado. In my teenage years I had tried to be a painter, until I discovered I could not draw, was a lousy draughtsman and had no feeling for colour, all distinct disadvantages in a would-be gran pintor. The attempt was not entirely in vain, though, since it sharpened my eye for the techniques of the great artists whose achievements I had sought to match. All the same, I was not prepared for the riches the Prado had to offer. Here were masterpieces by Velázquez and Goya, Rubens and Titian, Caravaggio, Fra Angelico, Raphael, Bosch – room after room of works so sublime they made my head spin.