Back In Madrid - El Prado Museum

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As I said in the last post, we are in Madrid for the week.  It's come to a close and we will head home tomorrow.  Our flight leaves at 9:30 a.m. and we arrive in Mexico City at 1:15 p.m. (CST).  Our bus from the airport to SMA leaves terminal 1 at 5:15 p.m. and we should be at our house before 10:30 p.m. It's a long day but the direct flight really makes a difference.  We will get up at 4 a.m. so that's alright considering I'm up by 5 usually.  A quick cup of coffee while watching the news, shower, and head for the subway station which is only two blocks away.  The subway will get us there in an hour so we will still be quite early but we haven't booked seats yet.  Let's see if we get lucky again this time.  If we confirmed our flight on line we would have to purchase seats and that's just another money maker for the airlines.  

We decided after all that we wanted to visit the El Prado Museum.   It is one of the most famous art museums in the world.  It houses paintings by such great artists as Goya, Bosch, El Greco, Rubens, Titian, Velazquez, Picasso, and Rembrandt.  It's a lot to digest but we started early.  Tickets are 14 Euros and a 50% discount for seniors.  We were there for six hours.  That didn't include our walk from the apartment to the museum and back.  We also returned the next day for the free two hours to finish the top floor of the museum.

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The lines to get in are long and you can always reserve a ticket online.  The lines move very quickly and we only waited about 10 minutes to get in.  The free hours have literally hundreds of people waiting to get in but they seem to have the system down quite well.  That line was about 30 minutes before opening the doors.  You're not allowed to take pictures so I am posting some shots from Google.  

The museum owns or houses over 8600 works.  We calculate that we saw roughly 2800 paintings and the Delfin Collection, created by the son of Luis XIV.  We saw that on day two in the after during the free entrance.  

The galleries go on forever.  I enjoy the works but more so the stories behind the painters and the paintings.  In many, they are a depiction of real-life scenes from over 500 years ago.  It's very hard to grasp, similar to those who have difficulty looking at colorized pictures and films from over 150 years ago.  

Some of the things that I find interesting is the symbolism in art:

Skulls appear in many paintings as a reminder that we are flesh and we all will reach an end.

Candles show that time is passing.

Mirrors and the reflections that appear in them are our or their souls.

Dogs!  I've seen them in many paintings but learned that they represent fidelity and faithfulness.

The majority of the art we experienced on this trip was medieval through the mid-19th century.  Most of the painters and their subjects didn't live past 45 to 65 years.  No wonder people married at 14 back then.

It is a lot to take in and digest and we are still talking about some of the paintings and the research that goes along with each painter, and royal subjects.  

We went to another city on Monday, Aranjuez.  It's a 45-minute train ride to the south.  The 16th-century palace of the royal family is located there.  Beautiful grounds and waterways that run through it.  We had originally set out for a stop in between to the town of Pinto which is in route to Aranjuez.  I had found the Tower of Éboli where Princess Ana de Mendoza de la Cerda y de Silva Cifuentes Duchess of Pastrana (that's a mouthful) was imprisoned by her father for murder.

Here are some street shots we took on our walk to the museum.  

And this is the last beer we shared today before going back to the apartment to pack.  I will continue in the next weeks to post all of the towns we visited and my impressions of what we have seen and experiened.