March 15

3-15
Today Katie and I went back to the Prado museum. It wasn’t free to the public until 5, so we went an hour early to see some of the sights around it. We were heading toward the Vertical Garden, which is a garden planted on a wall, straight up and down. We wandered into this art exhibition that our Estudios Culturales teacher had told us about, but we had no idea where it was. It’s called Arte en las Calles, which means Art on the Streets, and I think it’s collections of art that come to Madrid for about a month and then move on to another city. This month’s collection was all Rodin sculptures from Paris, including The Thinker. It was so cool to be walking down the street and suddenly, out of the blue, see one of the most famous sculptures in the world staring at me. There were eight statues total, all by Rodin. I think our teacher said it was the first time these statues have been out of the Paris museum, and I had wanted to see them, but I didn’t know where to look. I thought they were in another museum; I didn’t realize they were out in the open. I love how we always wander into cool things! Then we realized that the vertical garden was right there, behind the statues, and we had been seeing it the whole time while we were taking pictures without realizing it. It was mostly just green up a wall, since the flowers hadn’t bloomed yet. It was interesting, but nothing spectacular. The statues upstaged it by a long shot.
We still had some time before 5, so we decided to go into the Botanical Gardens that are next to the Prado. It was mostly green, and there were only a few flowers, but it still smelled heavenly. The flowers that there were were beautiful, and it was such a gorgeous day that it was very nice to walk through the little pathways amongst all the greenery.
In the Prado, we finished seeing everything in the permanent collection. We saw a lot of Italian Renaissance paintings, and I recognized a fair few of them. There was even the portrait of Mary Tudor that I used in my presentation about her last semester! It’s so cool to see the originals of all these famous paintings I’ve seen in books and stuff. We saw the treasure of the Dauphin, which was a collection of glassware, precious stone-encrusted gold and silver dishes, medallions, and little statues. There were even pictures that looked like paintings, but were actually made from precious stones like jade and amethyst. It was amazing. They were so detailed; I can’t imagine cutting the stones into such tiny little shapes and fitting it all together so perfectly!
There were also a couple of temporary exhibits that we saw. One was called Sleeping Beauty, and it was a collection of Victorian paintings that all depicted sleep in one way or another. There were some works that were sketches of the bigger paintings that were there. There was a set of three paintings that depicted scenes from the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, and one that was called the Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon or something, that showed King Arthur sleeping in Avalon until the day he’s called back to Earth. My favorite was called Flaming June, which is a pretty famous painting. There’s a huge version of it in the Pallas restaurant that we’ve been to in Brookfield or Wauwatosa or somewhere around there. It’s a woman in a bright orange dress who is curled up sleeping on a bench in front of the ocean. They were all really beautiful.
The second exhibit was called Between Gods and Men, and it was all ancient Greek sculptures. I think a lot of them were copies of the originals made during the Renaissance. I don’t think many of them were actually the ones that were carved a couple hundred years BC. There were a lot of sculptures of gods, naked athletes, drunken revelries, and naked women. A lot of them had missing limbs or heads, and some of them were just heads. And, of course, they were all in white marble. It was pretty cool.
I’m sitting in my room listening to Jesus Christ Superstar. I love King Herod’s Song! “Walk across my swimming pool!” Hehe.
Well, that’s all for now.
Bethany