A brush with history on an art tour of Madrid

“We could spend all day just in this one room,” said our guide cheerfully, ushering us into a grand gallery hung with floor-length portraits of solemn-faced Spanish monarchs. All too often my previous experience of the world’s great art-temples had been, frustratingly, like skimming the surface of a boundlessly deep ocean. 

Not so this time. Dr Zahira Véliz Bomford led us briskly through the Prado’s labyrinthine halls with the confidence of one who had known the place all her life. The tour I had just joined, entitled Art in Madrid: the Great Galleries, from cultural tourism experts Martin Randall, promised total immersion in a city whose massive art heritage puts it on a level with Paris and Berlin, but is not always easy to get to grips with as a lone, inexpert traveller. 

Glancing at the printed itinerary, I counted 10 museum visits over the next four days. And, crucially, the museums in question wouldn’t just be the Great Galleries – viz: the Prado, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza – but also the small and quirky places that many tourists overlook, such as the Sorolla Museum, the Lázaro Galdiano collection in its uptown mansion, and the hermitage down by the river where Goya painted the vaulted ceilings with a captivating panorama of saints and local low-life.

At dinner that night, over roast turbot and albari?o at a tavern on the calle Cervantes, the art-travellers found out more about each other. Among the 15 of us were folk from Maryland, Melbourne and Mallorca. There were a couple of West Country medics and a French civil servant living in Sydney who had come with her niece, a graphic designer from Paris. There was a teacher from Uruguay based in Leeds, and a paediatrician from the Hunter Valley. 

A senior conservator at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, our tour leader Véliz Bomford was profoundly versed in Spanish art and, as a renowned restorer, brought a special insight to bear on painting techniques and pigments in the work of Goya, El Greco and their ilk. Chilean by birth and British by upbringing, she had lived in Spain during the Eighties and her love of the country seemed to inform her fond relationship with the masterworks she introduced us to. 

“He was a very good painter, but I think he might have been a slightly difficult customer sometimes,” she confided of the 15th-century Bartolomé Bermejo, whose rich jewel-like colours, she revealed, were the result of the artist’s early use of oil paint. In Fra Angelico’s Annunciation – “now this really is one of the Prado’s greatest treasures” – she pointed out the deep blue of the Virgin’s cape, achieved by means of a costly pigment brought all the way from Afghanistan.

Then it was on to the big guns of 17th-century Spanish painting – the monumental El Grecos, the Zurbaráns and Velázquezs – what Véliz Bomford called the “life-changers”. “And here, we have what to Spanish art is what the Sistine Chapel is to the Vatican,” she announced as we arrived at Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas.

The Lázaro Galdiano Museum, in the posh Salamanca neighbourhood, offered earthly delights of another kind. Here, in the private palacio built by José Lázaro Galdiano and his wife, the wealthy Argentine widow Paula Florido, to house their fabulous and eclectic haul of art and antiques, we roamed the creaking parquet floors in blissful quiet. Our guide placed the couple in a long line of madrile?o art patrons running from the Habsburg king Philip IV to Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza and his widow, the ex-model (and former Miss Spain) Carmen “Tita” Cervera.   

The Museo Sorolla, next on our packed art-agenda, was the charming villa and Andalusian-style garden, now an oasis among the tower-blocks and traffic of downtown Madrid, where Joaquín Sorolla, the 19th-century painter, made his home and studio. Sorolla’s post-Impressionist scenes of Spanish country and seaside life made for a perfect pick-me-up of light-hearted hedonism after the long day’s heavy diet of religiosity. 

Next morning we were back on the big guns. At the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, we learned more about the workings of the art world in early 19th-century Spain. I loved hearing how Goya gave his brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu a leg-up in the court hierarchy, and admired the famous pair of self-portraits by the great man – one as a jaunty cocksure figure on the way up, and in the other, deaf and disillusioned at the end of his life.  

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From San Fernando it was a 10-minute stroll along the Calle de Alcalá, past the neoclassical columns of the Congreso de los Diputados (Spain’s parliament) and into the shady promenades of the Paseo del Prado where Baroness Carmen Cervera once tied herself to a tree in protest against a revamp of the Paseo. The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, home of her collection and that of her deceased husband, is one of Madrid’s triptych of bucket-list Big Museums. 

The peach-coloured gallery walls take a little getting used to, but the museum’s slew of artistic marvels – Holbein’s Henry VIII, an exquisite Van Eyck in black-and-white grisaille, and the early Duccio Christ and the Samaritan Woman – are all evidence, suggested Zahira, of the Baron’s near-faultless taste as a collector. “Now we have before us Picasso’s great icon of resistance and outcry,” declared Dr Véliz Bomford referring to the Guernica, at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. 

This gigantic work of 1937, she made us see, was in a sense the culmination of several centuries of Spanish art: here was where all the connections came together, like the lines of perspective in a Renaissance painting. “It’s extremely modern, yet calls upon so many references from history. Think of Goya’s Second of May, those scenes of chaos and helplessness. And of course, Picasso visited Velázquez’s Las Meninas time and time again – as did Goya.”

The Guernica also marked the logical end point of our tour. The group reeled out of the Reina Sofía into the heat of a June afternoon. The skies above us were a piercing forget-me-not blue. You could understand why a painter would feel at home here, with all this natural light pouring down on church towers, convents and palaces. 

Madrile?os have a favourite saying to describe their city and the legendary brightness of its mountain sky: “from Madrid to heaven.” But the past few days had given the phrase another layer of meaning: as a destination for art-lovers, Madrid is too divine. 

How to do it

A five-day Art in Madrid tour with Martin Randall (020 8742 3355; martinrandall.com) costs from ￡1,940 per person including accommodation, most meals with drinks, private coach travel and return flights.

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