"La Maja Desnuda," she read from the little plaque on the wall. "By Goya. Still more Goya."
"I don't understand why she's supposed to be so beautiful, or sexy, or whatever," her companion commented. I, eavesdropping, winced - I knew what was coming.
"I know, the first agreed. "She's so fat. But they liked that back then, I guess."
Art tourists!
There I was in Madrid's Museo del Prado, listening to a pair of Americans talk about how much these neo-classical images of beauty disgusted them (though not in so many words). You should have expected this, I told myself. Spain is a country full of skin and bone and Spandex - a country where the majority of people seem to be toothpick-thin, even despite the Spanish custom of deep-frying everything from veal patties to white bread. By comparison, Francisco de Goya's portrait of his wealthy lover, soft, pale, naked, reclining on herher velvet chaise lounge, stood out dramatically. La Maja had a bit of flesh on her body, a bit of color in her cheeks - a round face, soft breasts, even "love handles" at her hips.
Perhaps that was why I liked her?
But this idea of beauty has long since passed out of fashion, in Spain as in the United States, and our models are no longer quite so touchably, appealingly soft. So, rather than seek out more famous portraits, only to be confronted on one hand with the ghostly host of breakable-looking painted women or on the other with the grim army of of guidebook-educated art critics, I fled to the lower levels of this vast and labyrinthine museum.
Now, if anyone knows me, they know that my vacations revolve around a relentless quest for the tacky, the silly, and the downright cheesy. This means that if a tour book tells me that EVERY tourist visits X wax museum, tries the codfish soup in Y restaurant or skinny-dips in Z lake, I must have that experience too. Well, my guide book to Madrid had informed me that there, somewhere in that very Prado, was a bronze statue of a certain nude displayed in the center of a certain room, where the buttocks could be "patted appreciatively by generations of schoolboys." The extra twist: she was a hermaphrodite. I, of course, had to touch this renowned bottom.
When my friend and I stumbled upon The Statue in our flight from the tourons upstairs (touron = tourist + moron), I was swept up in delight. There she was, sleeping on her bronze pedestal, complete with the best of both worlds; and there, in full view, shone those well-polished cheeks. I was about to receive the Holy Grail of tourism cheese. I sidled up to the sculpture and looked furtively around the room. Not seeing any guards, I leaned over the red cord and quickly gave her bum three smart pats. Then, grinning like an idiot, I hurried away - trying, and failing, to be inconspicuous.
A guard meandered up to me. Damn! I though. Hadn't seen this one; maybe he'd been lurking in the doorway. Smiling, he said something to me in Spanish that I didn't quite catch. I figured I could reasonably guess at something along the lines of "Please don't touch the art, miss," or "Hands off, jerk," or some such, so I blushed and apologized. He just smirked and meandered off again, murmuring, "Vale, vale," (okay, okay). A bit confused, I turned to my bilingual companion for an exact translation. Seems a closer guess would have been, "You know, all the gay men who come here like to touch that statue's butt, since it's got, well, the best of both worlds."
Time for another getaway!
It had been quite an interesting museum trip, and at times a bit disturbing, but I lingered for a while on the grounds of the ol' Prado. A number of local artists had spread out samples of their work on the damp sidewalk, and Spaniards and tourists alike were buying and selling paintings from the depths of huge stiff cardboard folders. Although many of the pieces on display were extravagant reproductions of the art in the museum, or even bright collages covered in glitter, my attention was drawn almost immediately to the wares of a thin, mellow-looking woman with frizzy brown hair. In a soft voice, but one that shone with pride, Virginia told me about the paintings in careful Spanish. This one was oil, this, watercolor; this was her sister's cat, this was her garden, this was a friend. I was amazed, delighted, enchanted: her favorite subject was the female body, and her stylized women were nude, dancing, some praising the sun, some dreaming in blues and greens. And all of them, all of them, were well-rounded - comfortably-shaped - plump - fat! And beautiful! Each woman that Virginia had painted glowed with spirit and warmth and love. Each woman was a real woman. I wondered who this tiny creature had loved, or who had loved her, that enabled her to paint our human essences that way, capturing not the physical body at all, but the fire and soul of the Woman.
And so we rotate in and out of style likeplanets in their astrological houses, and sometimes the world wants thin, and sometimes the world wants fat, and sometimes we just can't decide. So, given that physical beauty is relative in this way, we should spend our energy - as Virginia did - turning the body inside out, showing the flesh and bone to be just a canvas on which we paint our personalities, our spirits, in brilliant colors. That way, we can always be sure of getting the best of both worlds.
