Breaking one of our cardinal rules: The two-museum day

One of our cardinal rules in planning vacations is that we don’t plan to tour two museums/historical sites in one day. There are two reasons for the rule:

1. I insist on us pre-booking tickets for any historical site BEFORE we arrive. That means we definitely get to see a site that’s important to us, but it also means we have to be at a specific location at a specific time, which can feel like … work.
   
   
2. We both acknowledge that learning takes significant bandwidth. To avoid overtaxing our brains, we try to prevent having to “input” too much new information in a short time. Otherwise, making sense of it starts to feel like … work.

And when we’re traveling, we’re on vacation! Our brains want a break!

But we decided to ignore our rule on Tuesday in Barcelona. We had pre-booked tickets to the Picasso museum at 10:30 in the morning, but we were really interested in touring a second museum, too, the Museu d’Historia de Barcelona (MUHBA). So we got tickets to tour it at 4:15 in the afternoon. 

Fortunately, the museums were small enough and their focuses unique enough that it didn’t feel like too much for one day. 

The Picasso museum features mostly work that the artist did in this city, where he lived at various periods. Highlights included a few painting from his blue period in 1901-04 and his intense 58-painting study of Velazquez’s Las Meninas in 1957 (we had seen the original painting in the Prado Museum in Madrid earlier on our trip). 

Picasso donated many of his works to this museum, including most of a series in which he re-envisioned various Velazquez masterpieces.

Here's a wall-sized version of one of Picasso's interpretation of Velazquez’s Las Meninas: 

 And then, of course, there's Picasso's take on portraits, including this one of his friend.

The second museum, the MUHBA, focuses on the historical development of Barcelona from its time as a colony of the Roman Empire in the 1st century through its transition to Christianity in 3rd and 4th centuries, and then as a medieval city in the 15th and 16th centuries. You can see parts of the original city walls that they have unearthed, and a fish salting and fish sauce factory. Later, the walls of the church and altar have been unearthed. This museum was very similar to the Settlement Exhibition we had toured in Iceland in 2018.

The remains of building walls and the original city walls took visitors back to the age of the Roman Empire. 

Some of the tiling from the original Roman buildings still exists.

This was the floor from an ancient Roman fabric dying and laundry business.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the other major museum we visited on our trip was the Prado Museum in Madrid, frequently ranked as one of the top art museums in the world. (The only drawback of the Prado was that it strictly prohibited photos inside the museum.)

We couldn't take pictures inside, so we selfied it up outside the Prado.

We both really enjoyed touring this museum and discussing it afterward. Key highlights:

• The scope of Francisco Goya’s career and particularly seeing the difference in his earlier portraits and his late-career series of Black Paintings.
• Hieronymus Bosch’s captivating, yet disturbing, The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych and Ryan’s late night rabbit hole research about its “butt music” and the artist tripping on bread mold.
• We were surprised to learn that we shared a “favorite” painting, Queen Joanna the Mad by Francisco Padilla y Ortiz. This is HUGE, it measures 3 meters by 5 meters, and is a compelling oil on canvas depicting the queen watching over the casket of her husband, Phillip the Handsome. I thought it really captured the torment of her grief and how public it had to be, and I appreciated that the Prado also had one of the early "concept" sketches that the artist created. Ryan appreciated its nuanced storytelling and the composition that harnessed the golden spiral.