SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Madrid's El Escorial, by JD

 A few brief impressions after visit to El Palacio de El Escorial (on a day in winter, hence the lack of 'real' tourists):

El Escorial is the palace built by Philip II of Spain and is situated about an hour's train ride to the north-west of Madrid and one winter's day we decided to go and do the 'touristy' thing and look around but this is not a tourist guide to the building, it is more of an impression of what we found there.

If you want the history etc then full details are here (in Spanish)

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monasterio_de_San_Lorenzo_de_El_Escorial

and here (in English)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Escorial

The palace itself is huge and very impressive in every way; here you can see the scale of it:

 

First thing you see inside is a small display of architectural artefacts including some of the original drawings as well as a scale model of the wooden cranes used in the construction. It is easy to forget that before the industrial revolution everything had to be done by hand and lifting heavy stone blocks required a combination of hard labour and ingenuity.

The royal apartments are surprisingly small. The King's bedchamber is centrally placed within the building and very cleverly designed; from his bed he could see the surrounding countryside through two balconied windows and looking the other way he could see through his private chapel to the Basilica's high altar.

All of the rooms are beautifully designed, furnished and decorated but none more so than the Biblioteca. Despite a huge fire which destroyed part of the collection, there are still some 40000 manuscripts and books in Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. Some of these are open and on display in glass cases. The ceiling fresco is by Pellegrino Tibaldi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellegrino_Tibaldi 
and, in my view, is much more impressive than the other frescos elsewhere in the building.

The Pinacoteca (art gallery) is divided into four rooms and displays works from the 15th, 16th and 17th century including this wonderful masterpiece by Rogier van der Weyden:

http://www.artbible.info/art/large/658.html

When I saw this painting I almost fell over because of the disorienting use of colour - red, which is a colour that comes forward, is used as a background and the two foreground figures (and two others on separate panels at the sides of the main picture) are bluish grey which is a receding, background colour. It appears as though there are four statues standing in front of the painting. The effect is startling and is not seen to quite the same effect in reproduction. You need to go and see it for yourself but don't blame me if you fall over; you have been warned!

Down in the Pantheon are the tombs of Spanish kings and various notable figures of Spain's history including the famous Don Juan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Austria) - the most handsome man in the world (so I am told!)

Part of the building is still used as a school and you have to admit that is one magnificent playground!

Shortly after this picture was taken an elderly tourist decided to join in, just to show these small boys how.... and with a muttered 'Dios mio' my compañera headed for the chapel to beg forgiveness for my foolish ways.

and only 6½ leagues and 1191 yards back to Madrid:

The return journey was my first and (so far) only ride on a double-decker train. Why don't we have things like that in this country?

TV: from the sublime to the ridiculous, by JD

Over the weekend I watched two very contrasting TV programmes on BBC.

The first, on Saturday, was the City of Glasgow honouring Billy Connolly with three portraits for his 75th birthday. Paintings by John Byrne and Jack Vettriano plus a photograph taken by Rachel MacLean.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0535lq5/billy-connolly-portrait-of-a-lifetime

And here are the three portraits-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-39947883

Byrne's painting is very good, as one would expect from him. The Vettriano is painted from a photograph (a still from a video in fact) as are all Vettriano's paintings which is why they are all superficial in appearance. MacLean's photograph was a wonderful tribute to the man. Connolly loved all three of them, the generous gentleman that he is.

It was a genuinely 'magical' hour especially when he was with his old friend the painter John Byrne. 

And then there was this programme about Silicon Valley last night:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0916ghz/secrets-of-silicon-valley-series-1-1-the-disruptors

These millionaire 'bright sparks' are seriously insane even the one who has run away to hide from the world in the Canadian wilderness. Biggest worry is they all think they are saving the world and building a better future, a phrase they trotted out quite regularly. 

The most seriously deranged, to me, was the one who allocated his time very precisely and allowed 35 minutes and no more for his interview with the man from the Beeb. I think I would have asked him rather more difficult questions. He said that work was what people did to earn enough to live and 'have fun'. Such shallow thinking is the opposite of what I tried to outline in my post "What is the purpose of work?" Or perhaps I am the one who is deranged?

The 'runaway' in the Canadian wilderness would have been funny if it were not so tragic. He is there only because our entire civilization created the means to allow him to escape: he didn't build his 4x4 vehicle, he didn't dig the ore nor smelt it nor build the machine tools which created the ammunition he was so proud of - "This will be the currency of the future" he declared. What happens when his 4x4 breaks down? Can he get it going again? What happens when he runs out of ammunition? You could think up countless examples of how other people's creativity and endeavours had given him the means by which he is able to run away from the world he has helped to create and of which he is so frightened.

The most significant thing, in my view, was they are all dodging their tax obligations there at home just as they do in the rest of the world. So it is really just good old-fashioned self-enrichment by lots of snake oil salesmen and some of their business models look suspiciously like 'Ponzi' schemes even better than the derivative trading scams or of Enron!!

Strange world we live in: the benign and the loonies all mixed in together.

The Cowley Dump, by Wiggia

I had the pleasure of visiting the Paul Nash exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich on the UEA campus. I have visited before for other exhibitions but this was a bit hurried as the exhibition closes on the 20^th of August and a couple of “promises” to go did not materialise.

Nash of course is renowned for his work in the First World War after he fought on the Western Front and the impact it had on him which he translated into his paintings.

Between the wars his work changed direction into the fantastical world and surrealism in many cases using the landscape as a backdrop to his visions.

At the start of the Second World War he was employed as the official artist attached to the RAF and produced a series of paintings of aircraft depicted as aerial creatures in animated positions ready for action, and then a series of crashed enemy aircraft.

But the interesting painting was his most famous Second World War work "Totes Meer" (German for “Dead Sea”), painted in 1941.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N05/N05717_10.jpg

The work was a version by Nash of the Cowley dump, not one of the most obvious by products of war but a necessary place for the disposal of crashed enemy aircraft. It also contained as much British material but Nash focused on the German. It's a place I had not heard of before and not the only one of its kind in the UK, but it is the one immortalised in the painting.

It was of course on the site of the motor works, much of which had been turned over for the manufacturing of aircraft, and the salvage yard was a valuable resource of materials for refurbishment cannibalisation and reuse of valuable metals at this time of shortage.

The painting was done shortly after the Battle of Britain and this is what Nash said of his work.

'The thing (the salvage dump) looked to me, suddenly, like a great inundating sea. You might feel – under certain circumstances – a moonlight night, for instance, this is a vast tide moving across the fields, the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain. And then, no, nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and dead. It is metal piled up, wreckage. It is hundreds and hundreds of flying creatures which invaded these shores (how many Nazi planes have been shot down or otherwise wrecked in this country since they first invaded?). Well, here they are, or some of them. By moonlight, the waning moon, one could swear they began to move and twist and turn as they did in the air. A sort of rigor mortis? No, they are quite dead and still. The only moving creature is the white owl flying low over the bodies of the other predatory creatures, raking the shadows for rats and voles. She isn’t there, of course, as a symbol quite so much as the form and colour essential just there to link up with the cloud fringe overhead.'

And here is Nash himself sketching at the dump:

https://bbm.org.uk/airmen/Nash-Cowley1-opt.jpg 

What also comes out of this story is that it could be multiplied many times world wide during the war, showing the incredible production during the war effort, most of which ended up in places like this or the bottom of the sea.

So a fascinating snippet emerged from my morning of culture, that I would not otherwise have learnt about, time well spent.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/TGA/TGA-7050PH/TGA-7050PH-54-1_10.jpg

Was I right?

I said in comments to one of my Monday pieces, "Up to a certain limit, one can purchase index-linked certificates to preserve one's savings, but I'm trying to guess what rich people will do to get out of cash if currencies everywhere inflate - buy Van Goghs?"

And now Reuters reports that Sotheby's is still selling contemporary art at high prices.

The rich are getting their servants to load the packing-crates into the train while still telling us that we'll win the war. Perhaps they'll flee to Argentina.