All come praise the infanta

Maybe France or Italy had more, but Spain has produced a fucking lot of great artists. There's this famous Velázquez painting called Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) of Felipe IV and his family. (Velázquez was the royal family's official painter when Felipe IV was ruling.) It centers on Felipe's little daughter, the infanta Margarita (isn't infanta just about the most dramatic word ever?). She's wearing this big fancy dress and surrounded by servants and midgets (what was it with European royalty and their midgets?) and a dog and Velázquez himself is in the painting, painting. Picasso painted all these interpretations of Las Meninas that, even thought they look nothing like the original, do somehow kind of get at its essence. (There are a bunch on display at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and the dog in one of them prompted on of my favorite Mom quotes ever: "Oh. I thought that was a cute little triceratops." It did look a lot like a triceratops.)

Anyway, the Prado Museum in Madrid has the original Meninas and, as part of a special exhibition, some of Picasso's interpretations. Very cool. The museum in Barcelona has a print of the Velázques painting, but it's way better to see the real things together. The problem is they're still not really together: The Meninas are in another room, separated from the Picassos by a large hallway, so you can't see everything up close at the same time. It would be so easy to move the Meninas into the Picasso exhibition. It's the same museum, they don't even need to get anyone's permission, they could just do it. It would temporarily take away from the Velázquez room, but that's what temporary exhibitions do.

Oh well. Anyway, as I already knew, Madrid is much better as a destination than a connection.