‘The pictures, they look at you.’ A stroll with novelist John Banville through Spain’s Prado Museum

By Joseph Wilson, The Associated Press on November 1, 2024.

MADRID (AP) – It’s the eyes peering from the canvases that get him, their gaze piercing the boundary between art and life.

That’s why acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville prefers to visit Spain’s Prado Museum during its opening hours – even though he’s been invited to browse anytime as part of a month-long literary fellowship.

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

“I don’t like coming here after hours, it’s too eerie. The pictures, they look at you,” Banville said turning away from the glare of Diego Velázquez himself looking down from the Spaniard’s greatest work, ” Las Meninas.”

The huge 17th-century painting shows the Infanta Margarita, her young ladies-in-waiting, a dwarf, a buffoon with a dog, a nun, a mysterious man exiting through a door, a mirror reflecting King Phillip IV and his queen – and also Velazquez, stepping back from his canvas and looking straight down at the viewer.

The painting – a paragon of Baroque sophistication – has fascinated generations of artists. Banville, with his love of poetic detail, is no different.

“I find that “˜Las Meninas’ is always a surprise to me, and a challenge,” Banville told The Associated Press during a recent stroll through the Prado.

“It’s the enigma of it, the strangeness of it. Every time I look at it, it becomes stranger again,” he said, surrounded by throngs of museumgoers. “Velázquez looks at you, saying, “˜Look what I did. Would you have been able to do anything like this?'”

Banville’s privileged access to the Prado – including after hours and off-limits areas such as its restoration workshops – over the past month is part of the museum’s “Writing the Prado” program.

The program, sponsored by the Loewe Foundation, started last year and counts Nobel prize winners John Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk, as well as the Mexican American author Chloe Aridjis, as its first fellows.

The fellows immerse themselves in the museum over four weeks before producing a short work of fiction published by the Prado with the editorial guidance of Granta en español magazine.

Banville, author of the Booker prize winner “The Sea,” the recent “The Singularities,” as well as popular crime novels, has an inkling of what he will write following his deep dive into the Old Masters.

“I haven’t worked out the details,” he said – but it’s about someone going through the gallery and about those piercing eyes.

“The eyes follow him. And I think … all his life … he’d had the fear of being found out, and all these eyes seem to know it. And I think Velázquez says “˜Yeah, I know who you are.'”

A frustrated artist who paints with words

While his mesmerizing novel “The Book of Evidence” hinges on a failed art heist, the storyteller’s relationship to painting goes back to a restless teenager tempted to pick up the brush in addition to the pen.

“I couldn’t draw, had no sense of color, no grasp of draftsmanship. These are distinct disadvantage if you want to be a painter,” Banville said with a wry chuckle. “I painted some dreadful pictures, oh God. If they ever come out I am doomed.”

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

No pictures, please

Over 3.2 million people visited the Prado last year to admire an impressive collection of the artwork of Spain’s golden age.

The 4,000 artworks on display, including the world’s largest collections of works by Velázquez, Rubens, Bosch, Goya, El Greco and Titian – along with gems by Caravaggio, Fra Angelico and Bruegel the Elder – are just a sample of the 34,000 items in its trove.

The Prado offers solace for Banville and others who need an escape from the modern world – taking pictures either with a phone or camera is strictly prohibited.

“It’s wonderful. I see people going around other galleries just taking photos, and I want to say to them, “˜look at the bloody picture’!” Banville said. “All the museums in the world should bring in that rule.”

While Banville considers that Goya’s sinister “Black Paintings” are “overdone,” the alluring ladies of Rubens’ “The Garden of Love,” who he jokingly says “are made of bread dough,” have won him over.

Another Velázquez catches his eye – or perhaps it’s Banville who is noticed by the leering drunkards in “The Feast of Bacchus,” where the god of wine revels with some men well into their cups.

In Madrid, Banville has also allowed himself his first month off from a daily writing routine that he figures he’s maintained since he started to scrawl out stories at age 12.

“This little voice inside of me said “˜John, take the month off. Just enjoy’,” he said. “My family in Ireland was telling me just how dreadful the weather was, and I am sitting here having a glass of wine in the sun. I don’t dare tell them.”

At age 78 and widowed three years ago, he is not sure how many more books he has left in him. But one thing he is not worried about is artificial intelligence usurping the place of true artists.

“A work of art is a very rare thing. There are attempts at works of art, and there are people who imagine that they’ve made a work of art, but they’re just kitsch. Real art won’t succumb to AI,” he said.

“I find works of art to be alive.”

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