THE UNSEEN MEADOW

Walks through the Prado Museum . For its classics and its forgotten ones. For its history, its stories and its nooks and crannies. Following in the footsteps of the classic 'Three hours at the Prado Museum' by Eugenio d'Ors, Estrella de Diego offers us a new route with a 21st century perspective .

And so appear in these essential pages such as Las meninas by Velázquez read in the light of Pierre Menard by Borges, or the works of Goya; also historical paintings that today we see with different eyes and interpret with another perspective, such as Las hijas del Cid by Teófilo de la Puebla or Juana la Loca by Pradilla, or the sculpture of Hermaphrodite; and forgotten canvases such as those by Clara Peeters or the splendid portrait of an African lion entitled El Cid by Rosa Bonheur, which was kept in cellars for too long, perhaps because its author was a woman and a lesbian, and if today we have to vindicate her, it is on all like a great painter to dry.

The unnoticed Prado moves between essay and personal memory and is a tribute to a museum that has accompanied the author throughout her life . A museum full of past and future; a living space, which is being transformed through the gazes of successive eras. Because, as Estrella de Diego says: « Museums, like words and stories and images, change at every step; filling itself with different and new narratives, those that demand changes in taste, those that pursue transformations in the concept of quality; those that are built, even without knowing it, from foreign laws: bring and take questions. It is a matter of bringing the forgotten to light –although what is forgotten is different in each historical moment– and rescuing the excluded with one thing clear: no matter how hard we try to recover the excluded, there will always be something left out, someone out .”