Voces del Prado

What painting teaches you

Juan Luna Fernández, Head of the Department of Conservation of 18th Century Painting, 1969-2016

When you focus on Gothic painting, which not everyone likes, and which is naturally almost all religious, some details of everyday life filter through. You learn things about how they felt and lived and about their spirituality. But you also appreciate the tastes of the models in portraits. Models that might be monarchs or prominent individuals as they’ve passed down to posterity with a haughty air. Perhaps more of an air of superiority than the spirit they could have had.
Landscapes show us what old cities were like, how people dressed, ways of life. For example, there’s an interesting detail relating to the collection of paintings by Bernardo Bellotto that was in the Royal Palace in Warsaw when Warsaw was ninety-eight percent destroyed in World War II. The city was so destroyed that there was a proposal to rebuild it elsewhere and leave its ruins as a monument to injustice. However, it was decided to rebuild Warsaw as it was. But what was it like? So they decided to rebuild 18th-century Warsaw on the basis of Bernardo Bellotto’s paintings, which were extremely precise and topographical.
Understanding Goya by looking at his works is an immense labour as Goya often adds something to the model that they lack or something they are concealing. Van Dyck, for example, at the court of Charles I of England, it’s always been said that he was a very elegant, exquisite man and that he imbued his models with his elegance and exquisiteness. Models that weren’t perhaps so handsome, good looking or elegant and didn’t have that grace that he imprinted on his paintings.
And Rubens is Flemish life. Without Rubens we wouldn’t have the richness of the Flemish 17th century. But Rubens is like a creative volcano. He was a man who transmitted his knowledge, class and culture to many compositions. But he was a man who loved life, a lover of bulging forms, of truly buxom forms. And if you look carefully at the paintings you can sometimes see how there’s a faint shadow of the blue veins of the figures that he portrayed with that fabulous flesh that he painted. Of course, Rubens was followed by Van Dyck who emphasised the elegant aspects and he was followed by Jordaens who emphasised the most vulgar and ordinary aspects of society, which Rubens also includes.
One learns a lot from these masters, and a great deal from Velázquez. Velázquez is a pleasure. Seeing a work by Velázquez is submerging oneself into a world, into the world of the Habsburgs, but also into the world of mythology in the sense of something human. Sometimes you also submerge yourself into the landscapes. Since my days as a student, how many times have I thought about Velázquez’s paintings when looking at the Madrid skyline with the Sierra on the horizon (before the pollution) and remembering that Velázquez painted those lights, with those colours and that atmosphere which seems so fresh and so beautifully captured by him. Because Velázquez was also a great landscape painter, an excellent painter of figures, of small details and of panoramas. Las Meninas is the absolute culmination, as are The Spinners, and we shouldn’t forget them. They’re high points of the history of painting. What do we learn from painting? Life.