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Updated: June 8, 2025
Judging by the repetitions, reductions, and copies that exist in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, the Prado Gallery, the Yarborough Collection, and elsewhere, these mythological poesie have captivated the world far more than the fresher and lovelier painted poems of the earlier time the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal, the Bacchus and Ariadne.
The column of the Dos de Mayo on the Prado of Madrid, with its yearly memorial mass, shows whether that spirit is dead, or in danger of dying. The second of May is well called the "Day of Independence"; it was, in fact, the inauguration of the War of Independence, in which Spain gained enough honour to satisfy the proudest of her sons.
"On Sunday evening, at half-past six, when the fashionable crowd which throngs the Prado at Madrid was at its thickest, and just as the Minister Fernandez was driving by in his carriage, a man pushed his way through the crowd, and shouting 'Long live Anarchy, discharged at him three shots from a revolver; the aim, however, was not precise, and one of the bullets wounded, it is feared mortally, the secretary, Senor Esperandez, who was seated beside his chief, whilst the Minister was shot in the arm.
After seeing the Maja desnuda at the Prado you realise that Manet's trip to Madrid was not without important results. Between the noble lady who was the Duchess of Alba and the ignoble girl called Olympe there is only the difference between the respective handlings of Goya and Manet. The noblest castle in Spain is the museum on the Prado.
To the year 1562 belongs the nearly profile portrait of the artist, painted by himself with a subtler refinement and a truer revelation of self than is to be found in those earlier canvases of Berlin and the Uffizi in which his late prime still shows as a green and vigorous manhood. This is now in the Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado. The pale noble head, refined by old age to a solemn beauty, is that of one brought face to face with the world beyond; it is the face of the man who could conceive and paint the sacred pieces of the end, the Ecce Homo of Munich and the last Piet
The city government, attended by its Maceros, in their gorgeous robes of gold and scarlet, with silver maces and long white plumes; the public institutions of all grades, with invalids and veterans and charity children; a large detachment of the army and navy, form a vast procession at the Town Hall, and, headed by the Supreme Government, march to slow music through the Puerta del Sol and the spacious Alcala street to the granite obelisk in the Prado which marks the resting-place of the patriot dead.
With this pair the various postal-card reproductions must have long superseded the desire or the knowledge of copies, and I doubt if many Americans of any sort now support that honored tradition. Who, then, does support it? The galleries of the Prado seem as full of copyists as they could have been fifty years ago, and many of them were making very good copies.
A very short time changed all this. Twice a day the streets were watered with far-reaching hose, a constant stream ran about the stems of the trees in the Prado, gardens were planted and constantly watered, and while the hitherto barren, dust-laden places began to blossom as the rose, the air itself became softer, less trying, and, perhaps, there is rather more uncertainty about the weather, or at any rate a greater rainfall.
Such slanders had never happened to reach my ears but I was already eager to refute them. "It was two years later that I made the visit on the way to the Prado. All day long the diligence rattled up hill away from the railroad, and it was dusk before I saw the Del Puente stronghold on its crag, evidently a half hour's walk from the miserable fonda where the diligence dropped me.
A far finer likeness of Titian than any of these is the much later one, now in the Prado Gallery; but this it will be best to deal with in its proper chronological order.
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