‘The pictures are looking at you.’ A tour of Spain’s Prado Museum with novelist John Banville – Brandon Sun

MADRID (AP) — What captures him are his eyes peering from the canvases, his gaze piercing the boundary between art and life.

That’s why acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville prefers to visit the Prado Museum in Spain during its opening hours, despite being invited to browse the museum whenever he wants as part of his month-long literary fellowship.

Still, he doesn’t want to be alone with the multitude of onlookers hanging from the walls of the labyrinthine galleries.

“I don’t like coming here outside working hours, it’s too scary. The paintings are looking at you,” Banville said, turning away from Diego Velázquez’s gaze on the Spanish greatest work, “Las Meninas.”

The huge painting, dating from the 17th century, depicts Infanta Margarita, her young servants, a dwarf, a clown with a dog, a nun, a mysterious man coming out of a door, and King Henry IV. It shows a mirror reflecting Phillip and his queen. Velazquez also turns away from his canvas and looks directly at the viewer.

An example of Baroque sophistication, the painting has fascinated generations of artists. Banville is no different with his penchant for poetic detail.

“I think ‘Las Meninas’ has always been a surprise and a challenge for me,” Banville told The Associated Press during a recent tour of the Prado.

“That’s its mystery, its strangeness. Every time I look at it, it gets weird again,” he said, surrounded by museum visitors. “Velázquez looks at you and says, ‘Look what I did.’ Could you do such a thing?

Banville’s privileged access to the Prado last month (including after hours and in restricted areas such as restoration workshops) is part of the museum’s “Writing the Prado” program.

The program, which started last year under the sponsorship of the Loewe Foundation, counts Nobel laureates John Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk, as well as Mexican American writer Chloe Aridjis, among its first scholars.

Fellows spend more than four weeks at the museum before producing a short work of fiction published by Prado with the editorial guidance of Granta en español magazine.

Banville, author of the Booker Prize-winning “The Sea,” the recent “The Singularities,” and popular crime novels, has an inkling of what to write after delving into the Old Masters.

“I haven’t figured out the details yet,” he said — but it’s about someone walking through the gallery and those piercing eyes.

“The eyes follow him. And I think… all his life… he’s had this fear of being found out, and all these eyes seem to know it. And I think Velázquez says, ‘Yes, I know who you are.'”

A frustrated artist painting with words

While his fascinating novel “The Book of Evidence” is based on a failed art heist, the storyteller’s relationship with painting extends to a restless teenager who begins to pick up the brush as well as the pen.

“I couldn’t draw, I had no sense of color, I had no drawing ability. “Those are obvious disadvantages if you want to be a painter,” Banville said with a wry chuckle. “I’ve painted some terrible pictures, my God. If they get out I’ll be devastated.”

From then on, he says, the sentence was his brushstroke.

No pictures please

More than 3.2 million people visited the Prado last year to admire its impressive collection of works of art from Spain’s golden age.

The 4,000 works of art on display include the world’s largest collection of works by Velázquez, Rubens, Bosch, Goya, El Greco and Titian, as well as jewels by Caravaggio, Fra Angelico and Bruegel the Elder. treasure.

Prado offers solace to Banville and others who want to escape the modern world; Taking photos with a phone or camera is strictly prohibited.

“This is great. “I see people wandering around other galleries just taking pictures and I want to tell them, ‘look at this bloody picture!’!” Banville said. “All museums in the world should follow this rule.”

While Banville thought Goya’s ominous “Black Paintings” were “exaggerated,” he was won over by the attractive women of Rubens’ “Garden of Love,” which he jokingly said was “made of bread dough.”

Another Velázquez catches his eye – or perhaps it is Banville who is noticed by the leering drunkards at the “Feast of Bacchus”, where the god of wine is enjoying his glasses with some men.

In Madrid, Banville took the first month off from the daily writing routine he thought he had maintained since he began scribbling stories at the age of 12.

“The little voice inside me said, ‘John, take a month off.’ “Just enjoy it,” he said. “My family in Ireland were telling me how bad the weather was and I’m sitting here having a glass of wine in the sun. I don’t dare tell them.”

The man, who is 78 and widowed three years ago, is not sure how many books he has left in him. But what he’s not worried about is AI usurping the place of real artists.

“A work of art is a very rare thing. There are efforts to create works of art, there are people who think they are making works of art, but these are just kitsch. “Real art will not bow to artificial intelligence,” he said.

“I think works of art are alive.”