Wrap it up

This sculpture, outside the House of Deputies in Madrid, may look like a Christo but it's just been wrapped to protect it from damage during the works taking place in the square (I imagine). Christo prides himself on the fact that all his work is temporary and that he has no existing artworks. If public works take as long to complete in Spain as they do in Italy this statue looks set to remain under wraps for longer than anything ever covered by the well-known Bulgarian packager and his collaborator-wife, Jeanne-Claude, now alas dead. I can't help wondering if her body was cremated or embalmed in some way. The earliest example of meaningful wrapping I remember was Lon Chaney's Mummy. And now I really must take a nap.

Quality gifts from Madrid

Gallery back

Maybe it's because I was exhausted and suffering from a bad case of gallery back syndrome by the time I got to the Prado last week, but these two paintings, both by Velásquez, made a big impression on me as consummate images of weariness. Even the gods get tired. Mercury and Argos don't have the strength to raise their heads, while Mars, the epitome of the professional soldier who's seen too many battles, looks as if he's wondering what he'll be told to do next. Neither of these paintings, it seems to me, could have existed without the precedent of Caravaggio's extraordinary fusion of the mundane and the divine, although I suppose it's possible Velásquez may have seen no more than one or two examples of the Italian artist's work and simply been influenced by a naturalistic zeitgeist. (I've just checked and Velásquez visited Italy twice, in 1629-30 and 1649-51, so it's more than likely that he was perfectly familiar with Caravaggio and the influence he'd had by that time. It was during Velásquez's second visit that he painted the extraordinary portrait of Pope Innocent X, criticised by the pontiff for being 'too truthful'. I wonder what Mars would have said if he'd been asked.)

Holy moly

This may resemble a sacred anatomical relic, like Saint Bartholomew's foreskin or the toe-clippings of some martyred Roman matron, but it's actually the central part of a chiropodist's window display in the Cortes quarter of Madrid. The rest of the window is devoted to corn plasters and diagrams of half-flayed feet (which also have an inadvertent religious air, portrayals of flaying being a popular theme in late 16th and early 17th century art - there's a particularly gruesome example of some unfortunate saint having his skin peeled off in Palazzo Corsini in Rome). All the putti are doing here, with their harps and whatever the other instrument is meant to be, is framing the chiropodist's skill with a recalcitrant bunion or two.

One of the best things about Madrid was the unobtrusiveness of its churches. In five days, the only one we went into was the cathedral, an unmatchably charmless building attached like a carbuncle to the side of the Palacio Real, where it no doubt brought comfort to generations of simple-minded Hapsburgs and their court of buffoons and dwarfs. It's now the home to some of the worst religious art I've ever seen, and I imagine that's true of all the other churches we didn't bother to enter, despoiled of their riches during the civil war, which are now to be found in the Prado and elsewhere, in grand and secular state.

The book I took with me to read during my stay was C.J. Sansom's Winter in Madrid, which looks like a failure of the imagination (mine) and, in some ways, was, as I plucked it from the pile of unread novels in my study at the very last minute, as much for its size as anything else. But it turned out to be an ideal choice. It's always a pleasure to read a novel set in a place you know, and it's even better when you're discovering the city as you read, in a game of real and virtual narrative mirrors. Gran Via, Plaza Mayor, Puerta del Sol - I shared them with Harry Brett, the novel's hero, as he struggled with poverty and corruption in post civil-war Spain and I, less manfully, with far too much to eat and drink in a much richer, and safer, city than the one the book describes. It's a well-researched novel and, I thought, thoroughly gripping on an intellectual and emotional level, its wilful flatness of tone reflecting the sort of austerity you find in films like Brief Encounter, an austerity, finally, of the heart. I don't know what Sansom's politics are, though I'm sure he's anything but extremist. Still, he spares few punches when he talks about the shameful collusion of the catholic church in the spirit-crushing destruction of Spain under Franco. There's a particularly appalling moment in the book - in the midst of the routine cruelty oppression feeds on - when some prehistoric cave paintings are found, only to be smashed to rubble and dust as pagan.

The photograph on the left is of a statue on the Gran Via, on the roof of one of the splendid 20th century pseudo-Baroque extravaganzas that line the street. When I took it, I thought of Icarus, but Icarus would have lost his wings well before hitting the ground, so now I assume it represents a fallen angel. It has a Gormley-like feel to it, as though the act of falling had stripped away the angelic qualities and left the bare man, upturned; even the wings look more like the leaves of a large succulent than aerial limbs, designed for flight. He's no more a creature of the spirit than the chubby gilded urchins are in the chiropodist's shop, entertaining their plaster foot with a tune or two.

Tourists

Decades ago now, I read a short story set in the future, when time travel was so common people chose eras rather than places for their holidays: Tudor Britain rather than the Maldives. The hero, for reasons I don't remember, decided to visit Judaea in the days leading up to the crucifixion of Christ. Naturally, the holidaymakers had to be prepared to play their part in whichever event they chose to visit, to blend in, and the hero, with the rest of his group, was dressed and coached appropriately, instructed in what to do and say. The tour organizers took them through the main scenes: Gethsemane, the Passover with Pontius Pilate addressing the crowd and asking them whether they wanted him to pardon Jesus or Barabbas, the stations of the cross, and so on. When the group was ready, the holiday began. Everything went as expected. Before long they were gathered in the square beneath the governor's palace and Pontius Pilate was talking to them, in Latin, with the two men – Jesus and Barabbas - standing by his side. The hero didn't understand what Pilate said, but he waited for his cue to shout Barabbas. Free Barabbas. It wasn't until he began to shout that he looked around and saw that everyone shouting Barabbas had come with him, from the future, and that all around the square, pushed to the edge, their voices drowned out by the tourists, were the actual inhabitants of the place, who were shouting Jesus. Free Jesus.

This story came back to me a few days ago when I was in Madrid. It's a shallow comparison, I know, but I was standing in Puerta del Sol, at the heart of the city, and enjoying that feeling of being both part of, and isolated from, a place, a feeling that's probably the essence of being a tourist. And then it dawned on me that all the voices I could hear around me, in what should have been a ferment of movida madrilena, a ferment I'd travelled over eight hundred miles to experience, were Italian. I might as well have been in Piazza Navona. We went to eat in a place called La Taurina, surrounded by the severed heads of bulls and matadors' capes, framed like fans, and every table was occupied by Italians, calling for paella and sangria and for Barabbas to be freed.I looked round, wondering where the real Madrilenos were hiding, waiting for the moment to reclaim their city.

Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long. They were packed like bocquerones (anchovies - don't worry, I'm just showing off) in the Museo del Jamon just round the corner, queueing in deceptively ordered fashion for rolls of exquisitely scented cured ham and something to wash them down with. The floor was covered with crumpled paper napkins, crumbs, the occasional abandoned glass; the noise around us was exclusively, exhilaratingly, intimidatingly Spanish. It felt like the real thing, which, of course, is what we were after, however much our presence contaminated it. Even the prices were foreign, as if we'd also time-travelled to an age in which a glass of decent wine and a ham roll could be had for a couple of euros.