Madrid

I arrived at the Prado at 9:30 this morning to avoid the line. Overall, I was quite impressed. While father told me it was dissapointing, I think that may be because he went before the completion of the addition, which opened in the fall. I was particularly impressed with the North European paintings on offer. Because Spain controlled the Low Countries for a while, there are a great many Dutch paintings in Spain. One of the best is called The Garden of Earthly Delights, which portrays heaven, hell and sin in a triptych. Unfortunately only about half the museum has captions that have been translated into English. There were no English captions for most of the Italian paintings and none of the Spanish ones. I was also dissapointed that two of Goya´s paintings that I was particularly keen on seeing, The 2nd and 3rd of May, 1808 were undergoing restoration. However, I enjoyed the paintings of the Spanish artists, in particular the El Greco´s and Goya´s black period pieces. Across the street is another art museum called the Thyssen-Bornemisza, which is smaller, but contains art from the early rennaissance to the present. While it did not have any extremely famous works like the Prado, it was still a very interesting museum in its own right. It was about 3:30 at this point, and I arrived at the Reina Sofia, the modern art museum, which contains the famous Picasso, Guernica. To my extreme disspointment, the museum was closed! Apparently it is shut on Tuesdays, unlike the rest of the museums which are shut on Monday. I suppose I will just have return to Madrid. Ideally, I should have spent about four days here instead of my rushed one and a half days. I feel as if I´ve seen almost nothing of the city except the interior of art museums.