Madrid, Bosch, and Sorolla

My trip to Madrid just after Thanksgiving was delightful, not just for the Palladio exhibition at the CaixaForum which was the impetus. The building for the CaixaForum is a redo by Herzog + de Meuron. The vertical garden they did with botanist Patrick Blanc on the wall of another building on the plaza just outside the museum is incredible. The paintings at the Prado were just thrilling and chances for a bit of Stendhal Syndrome. Bosch is a favorite painter and the Prado has five including the Garden of Delights and an Epiphany that I wrote about in grad school. The Thyssen Bornemisza has one or two Bosches. The Lazaro Galdiano has one. I lost track but a Bosch a day keeps boredom away. I took a bunch of pictures and I think my favorite is this one of the paint pots in Joaquín Sorolla's studio: You can see more pictures by clicking on the Flickr photostream link at the bottom of this page. I hope to get more notes written up eventually. Bill Connor was my traveling companion and his pictures are also loaded in my photostream. We got to Segovia and I really enjoyed the Roman aqueduct and the Romanesque churches. We also went to the Escorial which was delightful.

It's always fun to be reading something that matches or conflicts with your traveling. While we were there, I was reading Our magnificent bastard tongue by John McWhorter. So it was a history of the English language while trying not to screw up too much in communicating with Hispanophones. But we did pass a restaurant called Route 66 and that reminded me that I was reading Phil Patton's book on Route 66 while sitting in an Amsterdam coffee house of that name. By the way, McWhorter's book was very interesting. As the blurb on the cover says, the book "wears its erudition lightly."