Madrid

When I visited Madrid for the first time last December, I was spellbound by the city. It seemed like a good time to visit. December is gentler in Spain than in northwestern Europe and I was rewarding myself for having completed a major project. With A in tow, we inhaled what Madrid had to offer in ten days. From the off, there were the obvious and the abundant; from the city’s non-stop, day-to-late-night food and vermut culture to its over-the-top, operatic architecture and interiors of the Spanish elite (see Palacio Real Madrid as prime example). Also noticeable was the bold sartorial display on the street of the men and women of Madrid, the Madrileños, who were within touching distance of Euro trash glamour (not a bad thing in my books). Unlike the other Spanish casualties of overtourism, Madrid feels different to me, like it stepped a little outside of time and out of step with Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, or London. Lacking in pretense if you will. Madrid has the qualities of a person who is fun to hang out with; large, loud, imperious, and proud.

The place I most wanted to visit was the jewel of the capital, the Museo del Prado, the residence of Hieronymus Bosch’s best-known works. How the Prado came to acquire Bosch’s paintings is just interesting. It turns out that they fell into Spanish hands as early as the 16th century as part of Felipe II’s collection. The great-grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand and product of the notoriously inbred Habsburgs, Felipe II became the monarch who oversaw the global expansion of Spanish colonial conquest. In life, he was humourless and austere. Known to dress in black, unsmiling and haunted in his official portraits, Felipe II raised Madrid, previously a place of middling importance, into an imposing centre of wealth and power. He was, like his forebears, a keen collector of art. Perhaps rather unexpectedly, however, his tastes leaned towards the grotesque and surreal. He was in fact one of the earliest admirers of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (Following his mentor Bosch, Pieter Brueghel also sought the monarch’s patronage). Rather than diametrically opposed, Bosch’s lurid images were, as Luke Stegemann states in his 2024 book, Madrid (which I enjoyed reading greatly), “of a piece” with Felipe’s worldview and power. Just how that is so is explained by Stegemann in this truly stunning passage from his book that I quote in its near entirety. It deserves frequent re-readings simply for its masterclass in vivid, vertiginous scenes:

Along with his swelling collection of instruments, maps, manuscripts, codices, crucifixes, and reliquaries, Felipe was surrounded by these daring visions of Bosch; they represented ideas that accompanied him as he set about administering the new Spanish globe. Bosch’s circular or triptych parables were pedagogical; sober warnings against gluttony, vanity, and pride, stacked with superstitions and arcane beliefs. The moral instruction called on figures from medieval folklore – still so important the length and breadth of the peninsula – and on the exaggerated beasts and fierce punishments of worlds beyond. As the empire stretched out across the last oceans of the globe, Felipe’s artworks spoke of good and evil, and the possible end of the world amid a storming of crickets and amphibians of dark intent, grabbing, pulling and sucking on flesh. As he signed and signed his endless paperwork, the prudent king contemplated scenes of the black vomit, ferocious and hooded salamanders, gargoyles both sacred and profane; exotic flowers, dismembered bodies, smoky hell-fires, and sinners hung from gibbets or boiling in oil as punishment for their avarice and freewheeling sexuality.

[…] the strangeness of the artwork with which Felipe surrounded himself was of a piece with the strangeness of the new world that his empire was unfolding, with greater or lesser levels of violence, fascination, mission and greed. These vaulting renditions of heaven and hell mirrored the terrestrial reality of the first global superpower: a brilliant ultramarine world of global and distant clouds, of Pacific mornings, mountain silver and tropic dream. […] Empire was the orb that sat in the hand of God.

Luke Stegemann (2024: 125-126)

Under the rule of Felipe II, Spain was the most powerful global empire in its day. It seemed apposite that these paintings offer an extreme foreshadowing and even perhaps a glimpse for Felipe into the very real ‘hell’ on earth that lay just across the oceanic unknowns. Could these contorted figures and creatures of Bosch’s imagination be found in the half-known world? On which side of this grotesque moral play were the Spanish? Did Felipe unequivocally see himself on the side of God? Was there room for Catholic doubt in his role abroad? Did he acknowledge the shadows that darkened his soul as they were reflected back in these paintings? Was it possible that the emissaries whom he dispatched for gold, gospel, and glory were very capable of unspeakable brutality? I’m sure these questions have been probed before.

After spending a much longer time looking more closely at the unending strangeness in Bosch’s famous triptych than the other paintings in the Prado – we were there for five hours, there was a lot to get through – I felt quite transformed. Like the American art critic Jerry Saltz, who has taken photos of himself at the Prado in worshipful pose before ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ and ‘Las Meninas’, I am haunted by Bosch, as if I have developed a medieval mind populated by the monsters looking on with glee at the human bodies twisted by pain and fun. This is all to say that on my next visit to Madrid, hopefully for the Euroseas conference next year in 2026, I will need to make time for a revisit, only to see it again and discover other things I missed.