The Master of the Prado

by Javier Sierra

  In truth, I could not have felt more distant from all of this because everything I was concerned with was at least five hundred years old, and had little to do with geopolitics.

  My contemporary history professor approached me that day and asked me to do something that would bring my thoughts back to earth.

  “Weren’t you the one who said in class a while ago that this war had been the subject of some European prophecies?” Now I understood why Don Manuel had had his eye on me for the past hour. “Can you put together a quick presentation on that theme for tomorrow, and be prepared to discuss it with the group? It should make for a lively debate.”

  The assignment threw me. Since Sunday, I’d been thinking of nothing but prophecies. The comment my professor referred to was something I’d let slip at the beginning of the course, right after the invasion of Kuwait. What had caused him to remember just then? I was embarrassed to admit it, but I was hanging on rather precariously in that course. I had a choice: I could take on his challenge as a chance to improve my grade or I could continue my own private education among my Renaissance prophets.

  I gritted my teeth and accepted.

  For the rest of the afternoon, against all my will, I forgot all about The New Apocalypse, The Virgin of the Rocks, El Escorial, and even Marina. Instead, my head was filled with seers, verses from Nostradamus, messages from the Virgin Mary, and a slew of modern prophets of various kinds. Little did I know then that I would actually learn something useful from my assignment.

  By five that afternoon I had figured out what I would say in class the following day. It had occurred to me that the prophecies about a war in the Gulf were not as different as I first thought from the prophetic fever that ruled over Raphael’s Europe. In a matter of just a few hours I’d managed to pull together a pile of predictions that could all apply equally well to the current situation as to the era when the Ottoman sultans threatened the nations of Mediterranean Christianity. Everything that I got was from the newspaper reading room in the library. In those days, there was no Internet, or Google, and the few computer terminals you saw on campus were mainly for show.

  Among the most noteworthy of these prophecies, the ones that really stood out were those of Pope John XXIII—the “Good Pope”—the only pontiff in history who seemed to have a prophetic gift. According to some articles published in the mid-1970s by an Italian journalist named Pier Carpi—which I found by chance in the depths of my department library—in about 1935, Angelo Roncalli, who was then a bishop and the apostolic delegate to Greece and Turkey, had a series of seven dreams that were to convert him into a modest visionary.

  In these dreams, he spoke with an old man “with the whitest hair, sharp features, a dark complexion, and a tender and penetrating gaze,”1 who showed him two books containing revelations about the future of our species. Several days later, the old man surprised Roncalli in his small apartment on the Thracian coast, convincing him to take part in a type of Rosicrucian ritual. It was there, according to Carpi, that Roncalli transcribed the old man’s prophecies. He wrote them out in French, onto sheets of blue paper. Years later, the same mysterious old man appeared to Carpi and submitted him to certain tests, aimed at establishing that he was a suitable recipient for these revelations, whereupon a portion of Roncalli’s manuscript ended up in Carpi’s hands.

  It was a bizarre, elaborate story—baroque even—but enticing, and perfect for a group of future reporters. It had everything—exclusives, sources, and how to orchestrate an effective leak. And the more I studied the Roncalli case, the more similarities I saw between it and Amadeo’s raptures. The two stories had almost the identical overall structure: Gabriel or some old man who appears from who knows where—that was the least of it—to involve some man of the cloth in prophecies. For Amadeo, through eight ecstasies; for Roncalli—who would become the future Pope John XXIII—in seven dreams.

  Out of curiosity, I wrote down a few of these predictions in the notebook I’d brought with me to El Escorial. One of them read: “The half moon, the star and the cross will align. Someone will hold high the black cross. The blind horsemen will come from the Valley of the Prince.”2

  And another: “The great army will burst out of the Orient, inflicting eternal wounds, and its dreadful scars will never be erased from the flesh of the world.”3

  It was now late in the afternoon, and the dwindling light was slipping away behind the silhouetted campus buildings of the university. My work done, I left the department. I felt extremely strange. What kind of coincidence was it that everything that had happened to me in the past seventy-two hours had something to do with popes, paintings, and prophecies? What would my Doctor Fovel have to say about it all? Was he somehow responsible for all of this? Every time I thought about him now I couldn’t help being reminded of Pier Carpi.

  I arrived at the museum at ten to seven with an uncomfortable feeling that had nothing to do with the cold. I was tortured by the thought that I had lost the bulk of the day working on my unexpected assignment. It left me with barely an hour to spend with Fovel. On my way there, rattling along on the Metro, I had imagined the worst, thinking that perhaps this was a test of Fovel’s, like the one Pier Carpi had been put through by Roncalli’s old man. Perhaps if I was too late, I would miss my chance to gain access to all of Fovel’s great secrets. If I failed to find him today, would I ever see him again?

  I ran into the museum through the Velázquez entrance, ignoring the flashing Christmas lights. Arriving at the building’s central lobby, I took a rapid left, looking for the gallery of Italian art, where Fovel and I had last met, in front of The Pearl. I couldn’t find him anywhere. Pulse racing, my eyes searched in every direction to see if I could pick out his black coat among the day’s last visitors. Then I went through the adjoining galleries, in case the Master had decided to amuse himself among the Botticellis and Dürers, but to no avail. There was one other option—he could be in Gallery 13. I couldn’t think of any other possibilities. That was where he’d sent me when we’d parted on Sunday. “It’s my favorite,” he’d said. Determined, I approached one of the museum information boards to figure out where it was. The Prado had a fairly simple layout, with seventy-four galleries divided between two floors, but where the devil was Gallery 13?

  I approached a custodian guard. “Gallery 13?” I said, with some urgency.

  She looked me up and down as if I’d asked her directions to Mars.

  “I’m meeting a friend there,” I added, by way of explanation.

  She stared at me for another instant, and then let out a little laugh.

  “Why is that funny?” I asked, perplexed.

  “Someone’s playing a joke on you! There isn’t a Gallery 13 in the museum. You know”—she winked—“it’s unlucky.”

  For a moment I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The Prado Museum, Spain’s premier cultural institution, had decided not to number one of its galleries with that ominous number, just as some airlines omit row thirteen on their planes, or some hotels go straight from the twelfth floor to the fourteenth floor. I was stunned.

  She tried again, “Don’t try to find it—really. We’ve never had one.”

  At that moment, I felt like I knew nothing. I was suddenly at a dead end, an impassable wall.

  Was I the victim of some elaborate joke of Fovel’s? Or perhaps, as I preferred to view it, this was all part of a test.

  When I had first seen him, for whatever reason, Fovel had reminded me of another master, encountered by the very young Egyptologist, Christian Jacq, in front of Metz Cathedral, near Luxemburg in the early seventies, an incident that had had a great impact on me. Long before he was to become a world-renowned author, Jacq was admiring the cathedral reliefs when he was approached by a man “of average height, with silvery hair and broad shoulders”4—another figure like Pier Carpi’s!—who offered to be his guide. He called himself Pierre Deloeuvre, a name with strong Masonic echoes, which can be translated literally as “stone of the wo
rk” or “mason’s stone.”

  Whatever his true identity, the figure initiated Jacq into the secret meaning of cathedral iconography, providing him with a universal understanding of Christian temples, which, from then on, Jacq in effect saw as machines for accessing the divine. However, Deloeuvre’s teachings came at a price. Jacq would have to pass some tests to prove that he was actually worthy of the knowledge he was to receive, and to vow that he would use the knowledge to spread light, and not more confusion.

  Was Fovel doing something similar with me?

  Or maybe it was just me! Perhaps, overwhelmed by all this information, I was seeing ghosts where there weren’t any. Perhaps Fovel was just a nice, normal guy who enjoyed spending a couple of hours talking to a young fellow art enthusiast.

  The first thing I needed to do was to calm down, rein in my imagination, and simply be patient. When the Master was ready to appear, he would do so. Maybe it was just a question of coming back the next day, and the next, with a little more time. Or maybe I should just forget the whole mess entirely, because finally the idea of being the subject of some sort of test was all in my head. Nothing more.

  Somehow comforted by this idea, I retraced my steps toward the gallery where I’d seen The Pearl. Whether or not the Master was to arrive that day, I would calm myself down by admiring a few paintings that I now knew something about. A while spent meditating on these would do me no harm, and furthermore, I was now aware that one of the principal aims of the artists in painting these works was to induce a spiritual state in the viewer.

  I chose Raphael’s Holy Family with an Oak Tree. Or then again, perhaps it chose me.

  The painting was a size similar to the one I’d examined on Sunday with Fovel, with the Virgin Mary and the two boys as principal points of the composition. Only, unlike the other painting, there was no St. Elizabeth, and this was a serious enough absence to cause me some considerable discomfort the moment I noticed it.

  Unsure in the face of this mystery, and resigned now to my failed search, I tried to let instinct take over.

  At first, I ignored the feeling of unease. But after five entire minutes without my eyes leaving the painting, that initial discomfort—which I had first attributed to nerves—had grown into an inexplicable anguish.

  Hold on, I thought, rubbing my eyes. Why is this happening?

  In an attempt to explain that first feeling, I tried to attribute it to the scene’s geometry. The figures in both The Pearl and Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks form a triangle. In this painting, the figures lined up along a diagonal, which gave the feeling of scattering them. Was it this disorder that was causing my anxiety? No, I decided, that couldn’t be it. After all, this was a very bucolic scene. There was no trace of menace anywhere. Moreover, St. Joseph, who in the Holy Family painting was mostly in darkness, was clearly shown here gazing at the infants with a calm, thoughtful expression, completely untroubled by what the future held for them. And in the distance was a dawn similar to The Pearl’s—a foretaste of the dawn that the children would bring to humanity.

  Raphael, The Holy Family with an Oak Tree (1518). The Prado Museum, Madrid.

  In short, the painting was serene. A little melancholy, perhaps, but soothing.

  So why did it disturb me so?

  “You find it unsettling, don’t you, my boy?”

  “God!” I jumped upon hearing Doctor Fovel’s grave voice behind me, as if he’d materialized there out of nowhere.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he added, pleasantly.

  I looked at his feet. I know it sounds strange, but I’d once read that ghosts have no feet. Of course Fovel’s feet were just where they were supposed to be. In fact, he had on a pair of substantial English shoes with buckles, which I was certain I’d have heard approaching across the gallery floor. He stood there looking as impeccable as he had at our last meeting.

  As if he knew exactly what I was feeling, he said, “It’s not surprising that this painting makes you uneasy.”

  I forced a smile, trying to disguise my shock. Fovel had appeared in exactly the same spot as the first time, just as he had promised. Perhaps he’d been waiting for the museum to empty, for now that he was here, an almost absolute silence surrounded us.

  He went on. “It’s because the message here is just as contradictory as the one in the Virgin of the Rocks that we left off discussing on Sunday. Do you remember?”

  I nodded.

  “You know where that contradiction comes from? Look closely.”

  I looked, but said nothing.

  “Do you see it? Imagine for a moment that you know nothing about Christianity. If you’re not considering any religious meaning, this looks just like a portrait of a family with two children. But as you and millions of others know very well, Jesus was an only child.”

  “Of course!” I blurted out. “How could I miss that?”

  “Another thing—take a look at the boys, and at the wicker crib. It’s the same crib you see in The Pearl, but the difference here is that both boys have one of their feet resting in it, on the sheets. You don’t have to be a genius to understand the meaning of that, do you? Raphael is telling us that they both come from the same place, the same crib—they both have the same genealogical origin . . .”

  “The Angel Gabriel,” I blurted out, not without a certain irony.

  Fovel put a hand on my shoulder. A shiver went through me.

  “This is no joke, my boy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a philosopher from the Austrian empire named Rudolf Steiner believed that he finally understood why so many Renaissance painters insisted on always painting the Virgin Mary with two boys who looked almost identical. It wasn’t just Raphael and Leonardo who did this, but Tiepolo, Yáñez de la Almedina, Juan de Juanes, Luini, Cranach, Berruguete—dozens! It actually became a kind of artistic fashion to paint a mother with two virtually identical boys. It was as if artists as a group had all suddenly come to understand something. As if they’d all suddenly gotten access to something that had been hidden until then, and had decided to share it with their patrons, albeit indirectly.

  I scrawled the name down in my notebook—“Rudolf Steiner.”

  “Are you talking about something other than The New Apocalypse?” I asked Fovel.

  “Yes indeed,” he replied. “To Steiner, what these paintings showed was that there were actually two baby Jesuses, two messiahs born almost simultaneously in Galilee to two different families, not far from one another, and he decided to keep this extraordinary revelation secret. As Steiner would explain at his conferences, the first Christian communities agreed among themselves not to let this fact out, for fear that it could create needless divisions among them in the future. Centuries later, those who came to know the truth would hint at it in various ways in their iconography, typically disguising the second Jesus as John the Baptist so as to avoid scandal—or worse.”

  “Two baby Jesuses?! I’ve heard about speculation that St. Thomas was Jesus’s brother because his name in Aramaic means “twin,”5 but what you’re saying is incredible! It’s crazy!”

  “Slow down, my boy,” he admonished solemnly. “Keep your eyes open. Look at the world without prejudice, pay attention to your sources, and decide for yourself where the truth lies. That is the greatness of the path I’m offering you.”

  At that moment, I had no idea of how far his counsel would take me. I knew little of Steiner then, other than that he was a noted philosopher, follower of Goethe, writer, and painter, and above all the founder of biodynamic agriculture, as well as of clinics that regarded illnesses as having both a physical and spiritual component, and of course of the Waldorf schools. Steiner was a kind of early twentieth-century Leonardo—he painted, sculpted, wrote, and even came up with new architectural structures. In addition, he had developed a new system of learning that not only supported traditional study, but also intuitive learning and an emotionally-based approach to the arts. Hearing Fovel talk about him seemed very promising. I u
nderlined his name in my notebook, and next to it I wrote down the name of someone who could tell me more about him—Lucia.

  I kept that, however, to myself, and then blurted out what I’d been waiting a whole day to tell him.

  “You know, Doctor, I’m glad you bring up the need to pay attention to your sources, because that’s exactly what I did.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Absolutely. Since I last saw you I’ve been to the library at El Escorial and actually held The New Apocalypse in my own hands. I now know how it was the inspiration for Leonardo and Raphael. Not only that—I can show that Leonardo had the book in his personal library!”

  My revelation hit the old man like a bomb. I could see it in his eyes—his pupils dilated and his whole expression changed.

  “Really?” his voice faltered. “That’s quite a surprise.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said, pressing home my advantage. “Were you by any chance consulting Amadeo’s book at the monastery last week?”

  I saw a hint of something behind the dark expression.

  “No,” he replied simply. “Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing.” I had a flash of doubt. “No reason.”

  “What about Raphael?” He went on. “Did you unearth his connection to The New Apocalypse?”

  I shook my head, a little disappointed. “No one could tell me that.”

  “Well,” he began, “it’s really quite simple. Let’s see—who is it that runs the El Escorial library?”

  “The Augustinians,” I replied readily.

  “And they didn’t tell you?”

  “What should they have told me, Doctor?”

  “That one of Raphael Sanzio’s principal mentors in Rome was the prior general of the Order of St. Augustine, Egidio da Viterbo.”