The Master of the Prado

by Javier Sierra

  “Oh dear!! What a distorted view we have of the history of our Spain!” he groaned, without looking at us. “When you leave, make sure you go and take a look at the commemorative medallions that hang in the entrance to the basilica. You will see the monarch referred to in them as ‘King of all Spains, the two Sicilies, and Jerusalem.’ Our sullen-looking King Philip was obsessed with this last title, which explains why he insisted in having this monastery built in the exact image of the Temple of Solomon. Or did you not know that, either?”

  Marina and I both shook our heads.

  “The thing is,” he continued, “Philip built up his personal library with as many treatises and manuscripts on that biblical monarch as he could. Most of the books are extremely strange, like one that describes visions that the prophet Ezekiel had of the temple, or various manuals of such things as architecture, magic, alchemy and astrology, including books by Ramon Llull and Pope Leo III. They’re all here. And as to the sciences associated with that wisest of kings—Philip studied them all! With a passion! Our Phillip wanted to be just like Solomon. He even named his favorite dog after him.” The old monk gave a fleeting chuckle, adding, “So you must be looking in the right place for Solomonic knowledge.”

  “Is that why he was interested in The New Apocalypse?” I asked.

  “Very good, young man; yes indeed. Most likely Don Diego Hurtado acquired that book in Italy when he was King Philip’s ambassador to Rome. Hurtado ended up being just as cultured as his boss, more so even. Some say that he was the real author of the famous picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes, if you can imagine that, and that he was every bit as interested in mysterious prophecies as the king. Ah! Here it is.”

  Father Juan Luis reached up toward one of the shelves and pulled down a thick volume of parchment, handing it first to Marina. It was more or less the size of a modern-day hardcover novel, but weighed a lot more than it looked. The old volume was covered with something that felt a bit like suede when you first touched it—a dark, greenish fabric, without any markings or lettering whatsoever. “But how do you know that this is the book we’re looking for?” objected Marina, hefting the thing in her hand.

  “Well, that’s the funny thing.” the old monk replied. “After years in oblivion, someone else was here last Friday, looking at this same book. I presume you’re working with him?”

  Marina and I looked at each other, not knowing what to say.

  “Never mind; it’s not important,” he said quickly, guiding us to a large table with several chairs in the middle of the room. “I know how it can be with historians—every man for himself.”

  “Uh . . . exactly,” said Marina.

  But I couldn’t contain my curiosity.

  “That’s some coincidence.” I said, brightly. “You don’t by any chance remember his name, do you?”

  “Ay, no! I’m afraid I don’t remember anything lately,” he replied, pointing a finger at his temple. “Unless a name is more than three hundred years old and I studied it as a young man, I don’t have much of a chance of remembering it. I could look it up, if you like.”

  He then carefully took the volume and placed it gently on the table and had us sit down. Handing us cloth gloves, he nodded to indicate we could open the book.

  “Luckily for you,” he said, “this book is no longer on the secret list. You can read it without any restrictions.”

  “Weren’t people allowed to read it in the past, Father?” Marina asked him. The innocent tone of her question, without a shred of guile, seemed to soften the old monk.

  “Certainly not.” He smiled briefly and then explained. “This is a book of prophecies, young lady. At the time when this book was written, prophecies were a very sensitive business. Politically sensitive. Take a look at this page here—read that.” His finger tapped at a grayish sheet of paper that had been glued into the inside of the front cover. “It’s a note handwritten by a former prior of this monastery, sometime in the last two hundred years. Our good father wrote it after reading through The New Apocalypse.

  Curious, Marina and I leaned forward and read:

  The various propositions contained in this volume have the air more of rabbinical rantings than divine revelations. They resemble sophomoric and impertinent questions more than Catholic doctrine, which judgment is indeed the most benign that can be passed upon this work. In light of the above, I hereby order that this volume—entitled Apocalipsis S. Amadei—be removed from general circulation, and kept from sight, no longer to be classified even as a relic or item of merit, as no one is to be advised of its existence. / May 5, 1815 / Cifuentes Prior / Place among the library MSS.

  “So it was hidden then?” asked Marina, her green eyes wide.

  “Locked up and the key thrown away,” confirmed the old Augustinian monk. “Like so many other books from this very room. We were, in fact, the first library in Christendom with a closed reading room. And with good reason.”

  “So how long did the book go without being read by anyone, Father?” she asked.

  “Oof, well, to give you a proper answer I’d have to consult the registers. I will tell you that in the twenty years that I’ve been assigned here no one has ever requested it.”

  “Really?” I felt a stab of worry in my stomach.

  “In fact, even I myself hadn’t seen it.”

  “Father, when you have a chance, could you please check the register and tell us who had requested the book on Friday?”

  I handed him a piece of paper on which I’d quickly scrawled my name and number.

  “Yes, all right,” he agreed, puzzled by my insistence. “Don’t worry.”

  “Can we take a look at this now?” interrupted Marina.

  “Oh—yes, certainly. Go right ahead, you two. You do read Latin?”

  “Latin?” I said in alarm.

  “The only Spanish in all of The New Apocalypse is that prior’s sheet you just read. The rest is in Latin. The fellow who was here before to see the book told me that there are only three copies of this book extant in all of Spain—two in the National Library, and this one here. All three were written in the language of Virgil. And ours,” he added, smiling with undisguised pride, “is the oldest. Did you take a look at the title on the first page?”

  Apocalipsis sancti Amadei propria manu scripta. The phrase was written in a meticulous script, and I read it over a couple of times as the librarian pointed to the words to make sure that I fully understood.

  “Is this . . .” I hesitated. “The original?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t believe so,” replied the monk, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. “Someone added that later to make the copy look more important. The title page doesn’t even seem to be the same age as the rest of the text. With these manuscripts you often see a variety of writing styles, all from different times. Some of them can be very difficult to decipher.”

  “Would you be able to help us read this, Father?” I asked, tentatively.

  Marina added her own entreaty, brushing aside a lock of hair away from her face and fixing her sweet gaze on the old man.

  It seemed to do the trick. He busied himself finding chairs, and sat down next to us, placing his glasses on his nose before carefully starting to leaf through the old pages with the additional help of a magnifying glass.

  Father Juan Luis turned out to be a real gift. He read Latin as well or perhaps even better than his native tongue, and seemed to know a few things about Amadeo of Portugal to boot. Thanks to him, on that afternoon in the dim light of the reading room of the Monastery of El Escorial, I began to develop an admiration for this Amadeo, who was born in Ceuta in 1420 and died in Milan at the age of sixty-two. He was from a Portuguese family, and in his life was known variously as Juan Meneses (or Mendes) da Silva, Amadeo Hispano, Amadeo of Portugal, Amadeo da Silva or Beato (Blessed) Amadeo.

  According to what Father Juan Luis told us, Amadeo was a mystic, from a family of mystics. His sister was none other than Beatriz da Silva, the fou
nder of the Conceptionists, the “Blue Ladies,” who would later champion the defense of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception and achieve its eventual inclusion in Catholic dogma. We learned that Amadeo began his religious career with the Hieronymites, in the Royal Monastery of Guadalupe in Cáceres, but inspired by the idea of dying a martyr, he left the monastery to settle in Muslim Granada with the aim of converting infidels. He was lucky, and escaped being killed. No doubt what saved him was the Muslim belief that the insane are also men of God.

  Far from discouraging him, this experience only reaffirmed his commitment to the missionary life, and on his return to Christian Spain, he traded in his robes for those of the Franciscans of Úbeda. From there he traveled to Assisi, in Italy, launching a shining career, founding several monasteries of his own. He established a variant of the Franciscan order, the Amadeans, before finally becoming the personal secretary to Pope Sixtus IV, also a Franciscan, and of course the prophet par excellence of the Pastor Angelicus.

  Father Juan Luis’s background explanations were invaluable. He told us that Amadeo was obsessed with the idea of the imminence of Judgment Day, believing that it was only a matter of a few years, and admonished his followers to be on the alert for the signs. One of these signs in particular caught my attention. Amadeo believed that when the end was truly imminent, the Virgin Mary would manifest herself in all her splendor through various pictorial images, similar to the way in which Christ is made present through the Eucharist, and he wrote that those special images would bring about miracles everywhere.1

  That reference to images, or paintings, provided me with my next question for Father Juan Luis.

  “Tell me, Father,” I said, turning in my chair impatiently after nearly an hour of conversation. “Do you think that this idea of the Virgin Mary appearing in various images could have inspired painters like Raphael and Leonardo to represent her so much in their own paintings?”

  The old man’s eyes, having lifted from the text, grew wide. “Raphael of Urbino and Leonardo da Vinci?”

  I nodded.

  “You know, the Italian Renaissance was my thesis topic,” he said after a pause.

  I could not believe my luck.

  “Yes. And you know, there’s another reason to think that these master painters could have read this book,” he said mysteriously.

  “What is that, Father?” Marina interjected, clearly intrigued.

  “Well, take the example of The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo. There are some details in it which could suggest that the altarpiece was inspired by the teachings of this Amadeo.” He pointed to The New Apocalypse for emphasis. “Do you know who commissioned this work? Or why? Go look in any art book and you’ll see the same old song and dance: that Leonardo and the two de Predis brothers, Ambrogio and Evangelista, were commissioned to paint three altarpieces for the chapel of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception at Milan’s San Francesco Grande.

  “The usual story you read is that the contract specified that there should be a central panel depicting the Virgin and Child, surrounded by angels and two prophets,2 and that the other two panels would show a small chorus of celestial figures singing and playing instruments. However, for reasons that those books can’t explain, it seems that Leonardo failed to execute the commission as agreed, and instead delivered a work entirely of his own creation. I have to say that after having looked into this, I’m not so sure.”

  “Why do you say that, Father? Please don’t leave us hanging!”

  “Well, what no one tells you is that The Virgin of the Rocks was painted just a year after Amadeo died, and that not only did Amadeo die in Milan but that several years earlier3 he had been writing about his apocalyptic visions while living just a stone’s throw from that very same church. Moreover—as if that wasn’t enough—his funeral services were held within those walls, in that very chapel.

  “What I think,” he said, regarding us closely, “is that Leonardo was actually charged with creating a painting that would honor the ideas of the newly deceased author of The New Apocalypse. The whole story of the painting of the Virgin and the two prophets that was never delivered is nothing more than idle art history gossip.”

  “Hold on, Father,” I interrupted. “Which ideas in particular are you referring to?”

  “Well now . . .” Father Juan Luis, well aware that he had our rapt attention, savored the moment, slowly removing his glasses and thoughtfully rubbing his chin before going on.

  “There’s one idea in particular that Amadeo had about John the Baptist, which was that he thought that Jesus was in effect inferior to John in standing, since it was John who baptized Jesus in the River Jordan, and not the other way around. It’s like a kind of hidden language. A metaphor, if you like. A subtle or indirect way of criticizing the Roman Church, the church of Jesus and Peter, which at that time was going through an unfortunate period of corruption and intrigue. Both the Franciscans and Amadeo advocated a return to the simple poverty of John, the hermit, and the wisdom of his desert visions. This painting supports that view.”

  I remembered Fovel’s words in the museum: A dangerous idea.

  “All of that from a single painting, Father?” asked Marina, incredulous.

  “The way Father Juan Luis explains it all, it’s pretty clear!” I cried. “There’s an angel in Leonardo’s painting who looks out at you, the viewer, and points out who you should be looking at in the painting. And that figure is John; there’s no doubt about it!”

  “Not only that,” interrupted the old monk. “When Leonardo used to explain the meaning of the painting, he would say that it represented the meeting of the two infants who’d been announced by the Angel Gabriel. A meeting that took place during the Holy Family’s flight from Egypt, which absolutely none of the evangelists describe, but which Amadeo does, and which you can also find in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, in the New Testament Apocrypha.”4

  “So Leonardo must have had access to The New Apocalypse.” I murmured.

  “Exactly,” confirmed Father Juan Luis. “And the proof of that, oddly enough, is in Madrid.” He rose slowly with the old book under his arm, and then returned it to its shelf.

  Marina and I stared at him incredulously.

  “It can be found in one of the only two Leonardo codices housed at the National Library. No one would have thought that we could have such an important manuscript here in Spain, but back in 1965, two original notebooks of Leonardo’s turned up in the depths of our National Library after having been lost for decades. Interestingly, the notebooks contain a list of all the books that Leonardo had in his studio. The inventory was in his own hand, and clearly mentions a certain libro dell’Amadio,5 which is undoubtedly the Amadeo book, though it doesn’t mention a location.”

  “It could even be that book,” said Marina, half-jokingly, pointing toward the manuscript he had just put away.

  “Do you think so?” The monk’s eyes twinkled. “That would be quite incredible. We might have been touching an actual book from the library of the great Leonardo!”

  I interrupted his reverie. “What about Raphael? Do you know if he also had access to The New Apocalypse?”

  “Raphael? I have no idea. However, those famous paintings of his in Madrid, which in their time were the glory of the Prado, used to be kept here, in this monastery. I will say this: It would not surprise me if the divino of Urbino had also known about the prophecies of our Blessed Amadeo.”

  “Well, if we had to guess, who knows—maybe Raphael created his Holy Family paintings to make sure that the Virgin would appear in the Last Days.”

  The monk and I laughed at Marina’s new theory, not knowing quite how to respond. Perhaps this was the key I needed to understand the paintings that the Master of the Prado had been explaining to me.

  I would soon find out.

  4

  * * *

  MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

  The Tuesday before vacation turned out to be a strange day. I was so exc
ited with what I’d learned about The New Apocalypse at El Escorial that I could barely wait until I could return to the Prado and show my new guide what a worthy student I was. I’d even worked out a plan to get through the day’s activities as quickly as possible: I would go to my class, have lunch with Marina at her department, and then finally, at 4:30, I would go back to the Prado and find Fovel. All I needed was a plausible excuse for my editor at the magazine, Enrique de Vicente, so that I could avoid my afternoon’s writing duties at the building on the Fuencarral road.

  I didn’t allow for the possibility of my plans being upset by the unexpected, and of course the unexpected occurred. It wasn’t a particularly notable incident, barely worth telling, but it started to make me wonder if everything in my life then wasn’t part of something bigger.

  As potential reporters, my fellow students and I were expected at all times to be up-to-date on current events. It had been a particularly tense time on the international scene. In August, Iraq had invaded Kuwait. The UN had spent months trying to get Saddam Hussein to withdraw his troops from the Gulf oil wells, to no avail. As if all that weren’t enough, it had been only two weeks since the Security Council had authorized the use of force against the regime in Baghdad if he didn’t comply by the deadline of January 15. In an alarming development, the papers had just reported that three American aircraft carriers were en route to the Gulf, to join a general deployment which could now only mean war. And for the kind of journalism we were being taught, war is the most powerful aphrodisiac.

  It was as if everyone had gone crazy. The halls and classrooms were seized with feverish activity. Out in the courtyard, some students were organizing an antiwar march, while others were organizing a kind of peace conference with any faculty and students they could find who had any kind of Kuwaiti connection. The rest seemed to be engaged in churning out whatever placards and pamphlets would help to raise the political temperature of the campus.

  And to heat things up even more, there was the news that Mikhail Gorbachev had decided not to go to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Peace Prize, citing “pressures of work.” Everyone believed that a large allied attack on Baghdad was imminent, and even worse, that Saddam’s reprisals against Israel would spiral out of control into a third world war.