The Master of the Prado

by Javier Sierra

  The painting is majestic and tranquil, and clearly has many similarities to Raphael’s The Pearl—particularly in the arrangement of the figures—but there are notable differences as well. I couldn’t help observing once again how much Jesus and John resemble each other. The two children regard each other with a look that appears beyond their years, while the Virgin shields them and an angel seems to fix his gaze firmly on the viewer and to point to one of the boys, as if to say, “This is what you should be looking at.” And that boy is John the Baptist.

  I was intrigued by the fact that in the second version of the painting, which now hangs in the National Gallery in London, the angel’s hand is no longer there. In that version, Leonardo works to emphasize the differences between the two boys, painting them with markedly different features. In both of Leonardo’s paintings, this encounter between the two boys takes place against a dark landscape, much as in Raphael’s version. When one looks at the two paintings side by side—The Virgin of the Rocks and The Pearl—it’s not hard to see the influence that Leonardo had on his most ardent admirer.2

  Out of everything that I read that night in the university library, nothing impressed me quite so much as the description of Raphael and his arrival in Rome by Giorgio Vasari. A well-known painter and biographer of painters, Vasari was a contemporary of the great geniuses of the Renaissance. It was his description that finally convinced me that there really was a mystery surrounding Raphael.

  Having dazzled all of Medici Florence with his talent, Raphael at the age of twenty-five was picked by his friend Bramante to be part of the enormous project to refurbish the Vatican. “There,” writes Vasari, “he was much celebrated by Julius II, and in the Stanza della Segnatura of the papal apartments, he began painting a scene that shows the moment when theologians reconciled both philosophy and astrology with theology. In this scene, he depicts all the great sages of world history, and added certain symbols, as did the astrologers who would add characters from geomancy and astrology to tablets they would send to the Evangelists.’ ”3

  Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks (1483). Louvre Museum, Paris.

  Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks (1497). The National Gallery, London.

  The painting that the chronicler Vasari describes is of course the famous School of Athens, which Raphael completed in 1509, just as Michelangelo was bringing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to life. It is a work that is full of clues to hidden reading. The figure of Plato, situated at the center of the composition, is in fact a faithful rendering of his revered Leonardo da Vinci. But Raphael also places himself in the scene. He is the figure gazing directly at the viewer from the right-hand side of the painting, next to Zoroaster, Ptolemy, and a group of astrologers. Raphael’s presence in the scene was not a secret, and was achieved, according to Vasari, “with the help of a looking-glass.”4 But Raphael added one more small mystery.5

  Very close to where Raphael appears as an astrologer, we see Euclid,6 the great mathematician and father of geometry, though here Raphael gives him the face of his great mentor, Bramante. He is shown bent over a slate on which he demonstrates his theorems to a group of students. There, on the gold-edged neck of his tunic, incorporated within the design of the brocade, one can pick out four letters: RVSM.

  Nowadays we know it to be the painter’s signature, and while it may not seem remarkable to us, at the time it was quite an act of daring. Why? Because no painter in the service of the church in the sixteenth century was permitted to sign his work. Not one. The ecclesiastical authorities whose job it was to commission work enforced this rule with a great zeal, claiming that it was to ensure that the artist not fall prey to the sin of pride.

  The curious signature RVSM turned out to be simply an acronym for Raphaël Vrbinas Sua Manu ([Made by] the hand of Raphael Urbino). This discovery left me wondering. What did all this tell us about the great Raphael?

  Suddenly, it became clear. The Pearl’s creator had an innate opposition to rules. He was a rebel. Someone who, for some reason that I now felt impelled to discover, liked to leave pathways to his ideas by the means he knew best—painting.

  Raphael, The School of Athens (1509). Vatican Museums, Rome.

  Raphael, The School of Athens (details), in which we see Leonardo da Vinci portrayed as Plato, a self-portrait of Raphael among the mathematicians, and the brocade of Euclid that hides the mysterious RVSM signature.

  3

  * * *

  THE NEW APOCALYPSE

  The next day, Monday, I woke later than usual. Forcing my bleary eyes open, I felt as if I’d spent the night wandering among endless old paintings. One particular thought hammered in my head—hadn’t Fovel said that there was a copy of the book that had inspired some of Raphael’s and Leonardo’s masterpieces no farther away than El Escorial? I glanced at myself in the mirror and rubbed my face. Why not take a look? After all, it was less than thirty miles from Madrid. Whether I’d be allowed to see it, of course, was another matter, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.

  Or would it?

  I dressed quickly, stuffed a notebook and my faithful camera into a backpack, and left my residence hall, descending the stairs two at a time. Things were looking up for the first time in a while.

  My encounter with the mysterious Doctor Fovel, which had come completely out of the blue, had put me on the trail of something really fascinating. It was exactly the kind of story I loved to read in the magazine where I had been working part-time. On top of that, my first trimester exams were over, the Christmas holidays were coming up, and the thought of escaping to the mountains outside Madrid was a million times more appealing than going in for the last week of lectures and being completely distracted wondering what my Master of the Prado would have to tell me next time we met.

  There was also another contributing factor. My snazzy, new, red SEAT Ibiza hatchback had been parked behind my residence hall for the past few weeks without a chance to go anywhere. It was almost a miracle that I had the car in Madrid just then, because after I’d gotten my license and the car the summer before it had made more sense to keep it at my parents’ house. But for practical reasons I’d brought it up to Madrid that month so that I could pack up my clothes, books, and computer and take them back with me for the Christmas break, which was to start in a few days. The car would rumble like a locomotive every time I started it up after a frosty night, belching smoke like a power plant. A good run along country roads to San Lorenzo de El Escorial would do it good.

  So on that Monday morning, everything was lined up for me to track down The New Apocalypse. The one thing I couldn’t have predicted was that a certain someone would make sure she was included in the adventure.

  Her name was Marina and frankly, I wasn’t sure whether we were going out or not. I hoped we were. Marina was gorgeous—about twenty, with blond hair and green eyes, sweet, curious, and kind. She’d captured my heart the day I saw her moderate a roundtable on fashion in my department halfway through the previous year.

  I was attending the discussion because I had to, but then I heard her talk enthusiastically about glamour, and how the word itself was Irish, used by fairies to describe spells that would make one see things in a different way, and I knew we’d have a lot to talk about. I wasn’t wrong. She was smart, eloquent, and very flirtatious. I quickly learned that she had the largest jeans collection in the whole university, and that with a little luck, she would soon be joining the Olympic swimming team.

  But what really entranced me was that she seemed to have an endless curiosity about everything I was interested in, from science fiction and space exploration to Egyptian history and the mysteries of the human mind. However, I was hardly her ideal of a man. Despite my occasional attempts to move our relationship forward, she always managed to keep an exquisite distance between us. There was affection for sure, but love? The jury was still out.

  Still, I couldn’t fault her for that.

  As much as my exams and a few minor assignments f
rom the paper earlier in the winter had caused me to neglect my new car, I’d neglected Marina more. She was a second-year pharmacy student, and her classes were just across from the Department of Information Sciences building where I studied. In spite of this, most of our conversations were by phone, as on that morning.

  “You’re off to El Escorial? Today?!” buzzed her voice on the earpiece. I realized then how much I’d missed hearing it. A little ashamed, I decided to propose an outing that I didn’t think she’d be able to resist.

  I’d called her right at eight-thirty, after breakfast, when I knew her parents had left for work and she was alone in the house. My bag packed and ready to go, I sprang my treat on her.

  “That’s right—El Escorial.” I hesitated. “It would be great if you could come, though I know you probably—”

  “That sounds great!” Her enthusiasm threw me off. “You know what? I’m coming with you!”

  Until that moment, Marina had always been pretty good at disguising her emotions. I was never sure if her bursts of enthusiasm were for me or for what I was telling her. At that moment, I went with the first option. Perhaps I was overly optimistic, but after two weeks without seeing her, the idea of having her with me for this adventure was really appealing.

  “It might not be that exciting,” I warned her. “I have to look up a book in the monastery library for an article I’m doing, and—”

  “What?” Her voice came back over the phone. “The El Escorial library? You’re going to the monastery library and you didn’t tell me?”

  “Y-yes. Why?”

  “Well, I’ve never been, and we’re always talking about it in class!”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes!” She was excited; I could hear her smiling over the phone. “My History of Pharmacology professor says that they have the most valuable collection of ancient Arab, Jewish, and Native American medical texts in the world. I’m dying to see it. This’ll be better than The Name of the Rose!”

  I picked her up at her house just before eleven. She looked fantastic and was wearing a cream-colored coat, high boots, a hat, and matching wool gloves. She was dressed up as if for a special occasion, and her perfume smelled of roses. Perfect, I thought.

  Ten minutes later, under an overcast sky that threatened snow, we made for the A-6 highway leading out of Madrid to the northwest. As we drove, we made plans to have lunch at the Hotel Miranda and Suizo in San Lorenzo before heading for the monastery to see Amadeo of Portugal’s book—and Marina’s medical texts, too, of course.

  Everything went perfectly. Marina was as charming as ever, and I took advantage of the time to explain exactly what it was that I was looking for at El Escorial. I was careful not to alarm her with some of the details of my encounter with Fovel, and yet when I told her—half serious, half joking—that my odd doctor might even be a ghost, she was intrigued.

  “Doesn’t that scare you?” she asked.

  “No, no.” I smiled. “He’s very smart for a ghost. And a great conversationalist.”

  Once again, luck was with me. Like the Prado, the monastery was closed to tourists on Mondays, but this did not apply to the college, the offices, or to the reference library, and so it was a different set of people crossing the huge granite quad toward the library that day from the usual visitors. Monday was a kind of day for professionals. Not that Marina and I were really professionals, at least not yet. Nonetheless, our university IDs and my magazine credentials helped a lot in speeding us through the formalities. While Marina entered her signature and particulars in the visitors’ book, I scrawled down the reason for my visit on another form: “Consultation of The New Apocalypse.”

  The security guard looked us over. “Okay then—through that door over there, keep on going until you get to the end, and you’ll see signs for the library. And please stay in the marked area,” he said, without a trace of emotion.

  We did exactly as he said. The entrance to the library was directly above the main entrance hall in the front of the building. Marina and I climbed a plain stone staircase to get to it, and I still remember the clicking of her heels going up those stairs. There was a counter at the top, decorated with Christmas cards and garlands, and behind it, a monk wearing a black habit and an austere expression who greeted us.

  “Good morning.” He was in his forties, with a shaved head and a rather smart goatee. He looked us over sternly. “How can I help you?”

  Much to Marina’s disappointment, we were not in the great library hall that you usually see in postcards of El Escorial. More than a hundred feet long with seven enormous windows and an intricately decorated ceiling, that library is filled with glass-fronted bookcases packed with volumes stacked on their sides and the occasional spherical astrolabe. Instead, the room we’d been directed to was modern and functional, containing the day’s newspapers, modern encyclopedias, and a number of reading tables with lamps.

  “The New Apocalypse?” Our goateed monk raised his eyebrows as he read the additional request form I filled out. “Is it a manuscript?”

  “I think it’s early sixteenth century . . .” I mumbled.

  “I see. Pamphlets and manuscripts are kept in another area. You’ll need to come with me and make your request to Father Juan Luis. He’ll see what he can do for you.”

  Diligently, the librarian led us out of the reception area and down a seemingly endless corridor to a group of offices that overlooked the Patio de los Reyes. Several men and women were sharing computers, and everyone was dressed either in a habit or a lab coat, and wearing cotton gloves. The center office, which we entered, was occupied by a monk who had to be at least seventy, and who was bent over an enormous antique missal with a pencil and magnifying glass. His office lacked even the slightest trace of technology.

  Father Juan Luis made a grunting sound, which I took to be a protest of sorts, since it was clear that our visit had interrupted his work. He held my form up to his face and peered at it. The monk who had brought us to him took his leave of us, smiling for the first time.

  “Yes, yes, of course! I know this book well,” said Father Juan Luis.

  “Really?” I said, feeling encouraged.

  “Naturally. And why do you want to see this book?” he asked, addressing the question to both of us.

  “Uh . . . we’re writing a report on rare books for class,” I said, accidentally handing him my Chaminade Residence Hall ID, rather than my University department ID.

  “Ah! You’re from the Marianists,” he exclaimed when he noticed that my dorm was named after their founder. A smile spread across his face before I had a chance to show him my other card.

  “I also live in a student residence right next door,” he said. “The life of the student is a wonderful one, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Are . . . are you a student?”

  The old monk laughed.

  “Everyone is, in this place. I’m an art history professor, and still among my books, with no end in sight.”

  “That’s impressive,” I said.

  “Not really,” he replied dismissively. “In this cold, you could do worse than to be engaged in the work of the mind in front of a good heater! But you know all that! If it’s rare books you’re looking for, you’ve come to the best place in the world, and the particular one you’re seeking is definitely rare. Not to mention that it’s part of Don Diego’s collection.”

  “Who is Don Diego?” I replied.

  “Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza,” he said, making a sign for us to follow him.

  Though the old monk was stooped and scrawny, and looked as if he might collapse under the weight of his cassock, he was suddenly filled with an impressive energy.

  “You don’t know who he is? What kind of history do they teach you in that college of yours? As it happens, Don Diego was the oldest son of the commanding general who took Granada back from the Moors for the Spanish throne, and the owner of one of the most important libraries in Spain. He was raised in the Alhambra. You knew
that at least, didn’t you?” He glanced sideways at us. “Don Diego was a gentleman. When he died, in 1575, all of his books, manuscripts and codices went to King Philip II, who of course added them to his Librería Rica, right here.”

  Father Juan Luis led us to a door that he unlocked, waving us in while he found the light switches. There were no windows, and the room smelled strange and musty. When the fluorescents had finished blinking to life they revealed a large room over a hundred feet square, filled with banks of wooden shelves, all of which were packed with leather-bound volumes and tied bundles of manuscripts, everything labeled and numbered.

  The monk cleared his throat. “The item you’re looking for is one of the most interesting in this collection here, which is certainly saying a lot when you’re talking about the Royal Library of El Escorial!”

  “I bet!” breathed Marina, her mouth agape at the sight of so many ancient texts. She had never seen anything like it. Neither had I.

  “I can’t imagine Philip II reading all of this,” I muttered.

  “Indeed?” The old monk seemed to be enjoying our astonishment. “No doubt your idea of Philip comes from the famous portraits by Titian, which show a tormented man, dressed completely in black, weighed down by his shifting fortunes. In school I imagine you learned of this ardent Catholic’s great trials in the wars against the Protestants and the Turks.”

  We both nodded.

  “However, what rarely gets taught is that Philip was also a great humanist. He was curious about everything, and ended up developing some quite interesting ideas about the world.”

  “How do you mean ‘interesting’?” I asked.