John Banville’s Residency at the Prado Museum

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 con-men; 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.

In the world according to classical painting, pain is incidental; out here in the real world, matters are very different.

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.

I have returned to the museum on countless occasions. One of the highlights of my times there was when, some years ago, my Spanish publisher arranged for me to get in one morning before the doors were opened to the public. It was an extraordinary experience to have half an hour alone with Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), that consummate painter’s late masterwork. It is an ineffably mysterious picture, and that day I gazed into the heart of the enigma and was more baffled than ever.

After that unique, solitary visit to the Velázquez room I thought never to feel so privileged again, until Valerie Miles, co-founder of Spanish Granta and literary adviser to the Prado, emailed to say she had put me forward as a candidate for one of the Loewe Foundation and the Prado’s two 2024 Writing the Prado fellowships, in collaboration with her magazine.

Of course, I was both flattered and gratified when, shortly afterwards, the director of the Prado, Miguel Falomir, wrote to invite me officially to come to Madrid and spend the month of October at the museum. I would, he told me, have access to its ‘public collection, along with its private areas, the world-renowned restoration workshop, library, holdings, and our expert curators’. The only stipulations were that I should take part in ‘a conference or public event in the format of your choice’ in the museum auditorium, and write a short piece of fiction on a theme connected, as loosely as I liked, with the Prado.

What could I say except of course, of course, of course?

And yet. Advancing – indeed, advanced – years have turned me into what Americans call a homebody. I cling to my own desk, my own kitchen, my own bed. No doubt this is preliminary to entering upon my second childhood. Could I endure my own company in a foreign city for a whole month? But then I reminded myself that Valerie would be there, that I would get to see my Spanish publisher, María Fasce – and there would be all those paintings to which I would have unlimited access. The matter was settled finally when Francisco Tardío Baeza, Curro, for short, the museum’s head of international programming, came to Dublin and took me to lunch – and became a friend before I had finished my first glass of wine.

As my daughter said: ‘You hesitated? Over this? What’s wrong with you?’

So, with a virtual nod of acknowledgement to my three exalted predecessors at the Prado – Chloe Aridjis, J.M. Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk – I travelled at the start of October last year to Madrid, my misgivings about the coming weeks holding sweaty hands with my inveterate fear of flying.

Curro met me at the airport and escorted me into the city. There he took me to my apartment, just to the north of the museum in the blessedly tranquil neighbourhood of Jerónimos, and introduced me to my landlady, who greeted me with a shy smile – imagine, a shy landlady! – and would turn out to be as caring as she was delightful.

It is one thing to drop into a museum for an hour or two of a lazy afternoon, but quite another to know that one has absolute freedom of entry, at any time and to all areas, to one of the greatest art collections in the world.

Works of art attract and fascinate us at their deepest level by a quality of closure. This is especially the case in the art of painting.

The restoration workshops turn out to be a highlight of my days. To watch these infinitely patient craftspeople go about their meticulous work is a humbling experience; there are not many places, in today’s debased world, where one may encounter such selfless dedication to a cultural task. And it is not just among the restorers that I encounter what I now think of as the spirit of the Prado: it is there in the security guards, and probably among the cleaners, too. The Prado inspires dedication, as I was to see when I visited the library, the art storerooms, even the canteen.

And in every sanctum which I was permitted to enter, I reminded myself that I was being granted the rarest and most precious of privileges.

Since I first saw Las Meninas, the best part of a lifetime ago, there has remained firmly before me the image of the painter, in his smock adorned with the long-longed-for Cross of the Order of Santiago – the mark of nobility conferred by his friend and patron King Philip IV on this descendant of tradespeople – as he leans out from behind the canvas he is working on and fixes me with a coolly measuring gaze, detached and, I fear, wholly unimpressed.

So now, on the first day of my fellowship, and feeling suddenly shy, I avoid the Velázquez rooms and go instead to see my friend of long years, the little dog painted by Goya when he was old and in physical and mental disorder (The Dog, c.1819–23). What we see is no more than the animal’s head isolated amid a waste of yellow ochre and mud-brown, yet the picture is vast in its pathos and wonder. Some scholars suggest the animal is somehow sinking or drowning, but I believe it is witnessing a bullfight and is horrified at what is happening to its fellow beasts, down in the ring.

There are not many places where one may encounter such selfless dedication to a cultural task.

I am struck, indeed, by how much violence is depicted in these grand galleries and elegant, high-ceilinged rooms, and I am moved by how stoically all these deposed gods and fallen heroes bear their wounds and ravishments. In the world according to classical painting, pain is incidental; out here in the real world, matters are very different. About suffering they were always wrong, the Old Masters.

There is another picture I am keen to see. I have looked at it before, of course, but this time I am determined to see it. Jed Perl, one of the most acute and fearless of contemporary critics, had recommended to me Rubens’s The Garden of Love (c.1630–35): ‘a transcendent painting’, he wrote, ‘the couple at the left, the fellow’s beseeching face, the woman not quite looking at him – all of Watteau is already there’.

But Velázquez will not brook long delay. I approach that stony stare crabwise, as it were, stopping first at The Feast of Bacchus (1628–29), along with much else a comic masterpiece; then Aesop (c.1638), that tremendous brown crag; and, of course, the ‘buffoons’, especially El Primo (1644), whose fists somehow express all his suffering, and all his fortitude. I stop too before Pablo de Valladolid (c.1635), which Édouard Manet described in a letter of 1835 as the ‘most astonishing’ painting ever made. Certainly it is impressive in the daring of the composition and the placing of the figure, but the most astonishing, ever? Perhaps I am missing something.

And here it is: Las Meninas. Works of art attract and fascinate us at their deepest level by a quality of closure. This is especially the case in the art of painting. I return again and again to this painting not only for the skill and beauty of its depictions, but for the fact that it is ultimately shut off from me, self-absorbed and self-sufficient, unreachable in an enchanted space I may gaze into but cannot enter. 

Las Meninas, like all great works of art, is never used up, never wears out; it is new every time.

Now it is dusk in Madrid, as it was when I first arrived here as a 20-year-old, a failed painter and prentice writer. I pause on the hilly street that leads to my apartment building. The sky in the west is a phantasmagoria of purples, reds and egg-yolk yellow.

What shall I do? I will sit over a glass of Verdejo in what has become my favourite cafe, on the corner of Calle de Moreto. Tomorrow, Curro will drive me to Professor Falomir’s house in the country, where there will be conversations with my friend Valerie and my new, dear friend Sheila Loewe. I have had lunch with Javier Solana, unique in being both a physicist and a politician, and splendid company. Nick Casey, The New York Times’s man in Madrid, will interview me for the paper. Prado curator Alejandro Vergara-Sharp has shown me around the Rubens exhibition he has overseen, and I have read his wonderfully stimulating book What Is Quality in Art? (2022) – a moot question. There will be more glorious sunsets, more limpid dawns, more long lunchtimes, more as-yet-unseen treasures to stumble upon in the Prado. Yes, the Writing Fellow has arrived.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 255 with the headline ‘The Writing Fellow’

^{Main image: Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Love (detail), 1630–35, oil on canvas, 199 × 286 cm. Courtesy: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid}