This past weekend was my final full weekend of the Salamanca portion of the trip, now just one week to go. Next Sunday I move to Valencia, and I can hardly believe it! For the last weekend we traveled as a group to (where else?) Madrid. Having already gotten a little taste of Madrid during my free weekend to Toledo and Segovia I was very excited to spend a little more time there, even if it only ended up being about hours. Most of the weekend was spent at Madrid's two famous art mustangs: The Reina Sofia and the Prado. Before we made it all the way to Madrid, though, we made our first stop at El Escorial, a convent, seminary, library, university, church, and palace of Phillip II.
El Escorial is a large Renissance building located not too far outside Madrid. As mentioned above, the building had many purposes, both religious and nonreligious. At the time, Phillip II was one of the heads of the church. For this reason, he placed much more emphasis on the religious elements of El Escorial. Though Phillip's palace is located in here, it is one of the smallest and minimally decorated parts of the building. When building El Escorial, most of the money and effort went into the areas of religious significance, most notably the church and the library (because although a library is not directly religious, knowledge was important to religious study). It was interesting comparing those regions of the building because the rooms of Phillip II and his family were so small and plain, relative to most other palaces, that you never would have guessed this was the home of the King of Spain at one time. El Escorial also had an area with the tombs of every Spanish monarch and their spouse since Carlos V. This area is now full though, so the current Spanish monarchs will not be buried there when they die. Aside from the pantheon-- the room containing the tombs of the monarchs-- there is also numerous tombs for all the other family members of the monarchs who did not become king or queen of Spain.
Saturday afternoon we visited the Museo del Prado, which is one of, if not the, most famous and most important art museums in Spain. The Prado has an extensive collection of European art dating from around the 12th century to the early 19th century, which includes the best collection of Spanish art in the world. As we are studying Spanish art, this is where we focused our attention. Most notably, we saw paintings by El Greco, Diego Velazquez, and Francisco de Goya, including Velazquez's "Las Meninas". My favorite paintings were Goya's Cuartos Negros (Black Paintings) because they were much less realistic than a lot of the other works we saw. These paintings were much darker and a little scary, but for me that made them more interesting then the portraits of Spanish kings or religious scenes that we saw in other parts of the museum.
Saturday night after dinner we went to a Flamenco Opera of the show Carmen. Carmen is a famous opera, but this was not the normal version. Instead of opera singing to tell the story, the performers used flamenco dance and music. The plot was a little hard to follow, but years of deciphering near plot-less ballets made it a little easier for me to figure out. Though the dance style was the same as the flamenco show we saw in Granada, the addition of story made the experience very different. The dancing was good in both, but I enjoyed the added elements in this show, and ultimately preferred the flamenco opera to the flamenco show.
After the flamenco opera, almost the entire JMU group went out to a club in Madrid called Kapital. It was much the same experience as the club in Portugal-- loud house music, dancing, lights-- except it had seven floors with seven themes. My friends and I stayed primarily on the ground floor because that's where the main dance floor was, but we did check out most of the other levels, if only for a minute. We made it back to the hotel in time for three hours of sleep before we had to be up early for Sunday's excursions.
Probably my favorite part of the weekend was Sundays trip to the Museo de Reina Sofia. Another famous art museum in Madrid, the Reina Sofia houses a collection of contemporary Spanish art, unlike the older works found in the Prado. The Renia Sofia has many paintings by famous Spanish artists such as Picasso, Dali, and Miro, and I really enjoyed seeing the art by these artists because in general, I prefer contemporary art to the older styles like the ones featured in the Prado. The Reina Sofia is also home to possibly the most famous work of 20th century art, Picasso's "Guernica." This, for me, was the highlight of the museum. The painting is huge, and at first glance very chaotic and nonsensical. After taking a good look, though, you start to notice all the significance and symbolism in the painting-- the blacked out image of a bird representing the lack of peace, the flower next to the broken sword signifying hope, and of course the anguished faces of mother, child, man and beast showing that the war is harming everyone involved-- and you realize just how powerful a work of art it is.
For the final excursion of the weekend (and the Salamanca trip!), we visited the Royal Palace of Madrid. This is no longer the home of the Spanish monarchs because they downgraded to a smaller and cozier palace in another part of Madrid, and I could definitely see why! The place was enormous and the decor was absurdly extravagant! Just to give you an idea of this, they had separate rooms for breakfast, meals, coffee, and dining with guests. The rooms had floors with different colored marble arranged in designs, often with ornate rugs over top. The walls were covered in colorful printed designs or gold baroque, with furniture to match. Lastly, the ceilings were painted with beautiful frescos depicting angels and the heavens. This, all just in the family´s various dining areas (both public and private). This amount of over-the-top decor followed through most of the rest of the parts of the palace that we saw.
Photos for this trip are limited because most of the places we visited didn't allow them. That said, here are the few I managed to snag:
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| El Escorial |
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| Library of El Escorial (Only photo I managed to sneak from inside) |
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| Kapital |
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| Royal Palace of Madrid |
Aubrey
