THE HIDDEN SIDE OF THE PRADO
He is drawn into conversation with the mysterious Doctor Luis Fovel
CLIVE PRINCE travelled to Madrid for a personal tour of the Prado Museum with novelist Javier Sierra in which they explored the links between artistic pratice and esoteric meanings from Da Vinci to Dalí.
The links between the artistic and the esoteric have been the subject of much interest in recent years, and nowhere more so than Spain, where Javier Sierra’s bestselling novel The Master of the
Prado has brought ‘occulture’ out of the shadows. CLIVE PRINCE travelled to Madrid for a personal tour of the Museum with Javier, exploring the borderlands between artistic practice and arcane meaning.
High on any tourist’s list in Madrid is a visit to the Museo del Prado, Spain’s national gallery. At least it was back when visitors could jostle carefree in the city’s plazas and wander through the Prado’s galleries unmasked and without keeping to a one-way, socially-distanced route.
Ah, those heady pre-pandemic days of 2019…
Like many galleries and museums, the Prado has its hidden side, one literally hidden in plain sight. And on 13 October 2019 I was initiated into its secrets.
I was in Spain for the launch of an updated translation marking the 25th anniversary of the book Lynn Picknett and I wrote about Leonardo daVinci’s faking of the Turin Shroud, the first we worked on together. The main event was delivering a lecture at the annual Encuentro Internacional de Ocultura (International Occulture Conference) in the historic city of León. Sadly, fate had decreed that I was going solo on this trip, as a severe back problem had prevented Lynn from travelling.
‘Occulture’ – a term coined by Genesis P-Orridge back in the Eighties – has become a bit off a buzzword in recent years. It describes the interaction between esoterica and wider culture, representing, in the definition of Gary Lachman (with whom Lynn and I travelled to speak at the first León conference two years earlier), “the strange interzone between creativity and ritual, the liminal space blending magic and art.” (see FT253:44-45, 310:56-57)
The Ocultura Conference is the kind of public event that we don’t have in Britain, where interest in the esoteric is rather more, well, esoteric. In Spain ocultismo is taken more seriously. The conference, a four-day series of lectures, one each evening, is supported by León’s city council and held in its grand auditorium – and entry is free.
This year’s theme was ‘The Great Mysteries of Art’, with which our work on Leonardo fitted neatly. The other speakers were an art historian (Guillermo Solana, director of Madrid’s prestigious Thyssen Art Museum, on the influence of Spiritualism on the Surrealist movement), an Egyptologist (Nacho Ares, on pharaonic art and architecture) and an astrologer (Vicente Cassanya, on the use of astrological symbolism in art). Lynn and I had been invited to give the closing lecture, on the Saturday night that was also Spain’s National Day.
The event is the creation of its host, Javier Sierra, and is tied in with a series of books, also entitled ‘Ocultura’ and published by Luciérnaga, that he curates. Javier is a high-profile figure in Spain on matters mysterious, anomalous and esoteric, with a CV as long as your arm that begins with having his own radio show at the age of 12. He was at one time the director of Más Allá ( Beyond), a kind of Spanish Fortean Times, to which he remains a consultant. He’s written nonfiction books on Roswell and ancient civilisations, and edited and presented TV shows about the paranormal, UFOs and other fortean subjects, his current one being Otros mundos ( Other Worlds).
He’s also an award-winning novelist, in 2017 receiving Spain’s top literary prize, the Premio Planeta de Novela, for El fuego invisible ( The Invisible Fire). His 2004 novel about Leonardo daVinci, La cena secreta ( The Secret Supper), made the NewYork Times bestseller lists; coincidentally, it came out around the same time as Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and, like that novel, drew some inspiration from our book The Templar Revelation. Appropriately, Lynn and I first met Javier during the ‘DaVinci Code trial’ in London’s High Court in 2006 (see FT209:4-5, 210:5).
He’s possibly the coolest guy I know, wearing his celebrity lightly, and with a deeper knowledge of his subjects than hosts of ‘mysteries’ TV shows tend to have in the Englishspeaking world. And, somehow, he finds time to organise and present the Ocultura conferences.
The day after the talk, I took the train to Madrid with Isabela Herranz, herself a writer on mysteries who was interpreting for the trip (Lynn and I first met her at an FT UnConvention back in the early 2000s), for a rest day before launching into a round of media to publicise the book. It was then – after being introduced to genuine Spanish paella by Javier and his delightful family at Sunday lunch – that Javier took me on an afternoon tour of the Prado.
THE ARCANON
Having Javier as a guide made my first visit even more special. The museum is the setting for Javier’s haunting 2013 novel, El maestro del Prado ( The Master of the Prado), which stayed on Spain’s bestseller lists for over a year. It’s a tale that blurs the line between imagination and reality, deliberately provoking the question of how much of it is really fiction.
The narrator is Javier himself, in his days as a 19-year-old student at the beginning of the 1990s, and tells the story of his initiation into the esoteric mysteries of art. During a visit to the Prado, while he is contemplating The Pearl by Raphael and his pupil Giulio Romano, Javier is drawn into conversation with the mysterious Dr Luis Fovel – the ‘Master’ of the title – who, at more meetings over the ensuing weeks, explains the secrets encoded in some of the gallery’s most celebrated paintings and embroils Javier in increasingly labyrinthine events as he tries to unravel the truth about Dr Fovel. The question hangs over the story of whether the Master is a man, a ghost, or something else – perhaps a guiding spirit of some kind.
In the novel, Fovel introduces the youthful Javier to what he calls the Prado’s ‘arcanon’ – an arcane canon of selected works put together by “wizards, astrologers, and doctors of occult philosophy” at the Spanish court, works which “could best serve certain supernatural ends”.
And, as Javier guided me through the galleries, taking me through some of the same works, as well as others that don’t feature in the novel, I realised that he was doing the same for me, effectively becoming my Dr Fovel.
The hidden mysteries of art have always been a main interest of mine and Lynn’s. The Templar Revelation begins with an analysis
– a decoding – of heretical symbolism in the paintings of Leonardo daVinci, and the recognition that parallel imagery appears in the works of Jean Cocteau, an artist far removed
from Leonardo in time, culture and style.
Over the near quarter-century since that book we’ve continued to explore the cryptic thread linking some of the great artists down the centuries, finding more associations ourselves and connecting with others – for example, the Brussels-based conceptual artist Kendell Geers – whose own research has led him on a similar path. Kendell has found eerily precise, deeply concealed hermetic signs hidden in the work of Leonardo that were repeated through the work of Poussin and Ingres and into the 20th century with the likes of Cocteau, Picabia and even as unexpected an artist as Marcel Duchamp, he of urinalas-art fame. 3
But that’s another story. For now, we’re in the Prado, with Javier opening a new chapter.
The paintings of the arcanon are for the most part religious and – like Leonardo’s – portray apparently conventional Christian scenes and imagery while containing discordant elements that are open to decidedly less conventional interpretations. Fovel’s decoding of some, particularly those showing the Holy Family – The Pearl is a prime example – chime strikingly with our analyses of Leonardo’s works. There is, for example, the same predilection for depicting Mary and Joseph with two children, one assumed to be John the Baptist, their appearances so similar as to confuse their identities.
The works are mainly from the Spanish Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries, and many were assembled by two of Spain’s greatest Habsburg kings, Charles I and his son
Philip II. Both were leaders and defenders of Catholic Europe: on the surface ultra-Catholics who, in the contrary way of the age (and the imperious doublethink of those who believe themselves to be above others), privately patronised alchemists and other practitioners of the magical arts, as well as heretics. Hedging their bets, maybe...
EARTHLY DELIGHTS
The works that weren’t commissioned by those imperial majesties were sought out by them – the booty of war or purchases from other sovereigns. The first exhibit Javier showed me, perhaps the Prado’s most famous, was part of the booty, taken from William of Orange during the Dutch Revolt: Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted in the opening years of the 16th century.
Unlike in Javier’s student days, the triptych is now displayed in the round, so that the images on the panels that originally faced outward when it was closed can be examined. They show a monochrome view of the world with an ancient, bearded God seated in a bubble above it.
The three vividly coloured panels of the opened triptych – as bright as the pictures in a children’s book – seem to present a conventional Christian message. In the left-hand panel a naked Adam and Eve relax with a robed God in the Garden of Eden, pre-Fall. In the centre, a populated Earth swarms with people, again naked, cavorting with all manner of animals and birds and gorging on fruits – the earthly delights of its modern title. Finally, on the right, is a darkened world, lit only by blitz-like fires silhouetting ruined buildings, with men and women being tormented and devoured by grotesque creatures. The products and apparatus of mankind’s progress – knives, a thermometer, an hourglass, musical instruments – take on nightmarish forms and turn on their creators.
The message seems simple enough: we were in Eden (past), fell through sin and are heading towards Hell and damnation (future). Interpretations of the middle scene – the present – vary: either a hedonistic pursuit of
sensual pleasure that will lead us to that damnation (although there’s little overt eroticism, with only one distant couple seeming to touch intimately), or a depiction of the unthinking innocence that’s taking us down the same path.
But, Javier explains, there is evidence not only that Bosch was steeped in the occult philosophy of his day but was a member of the Adamite sect. The original Adamites were a heretical north African group, known from condemnations in early Church writings, which believed that salvation was to be found in returning to the way Adam and Eve lived, for which reason they worshipped naked. Considering marriage a consequence of the expulsion from Eden, the Adamites practised free love. Although the original sect disappeared in the fourth century, it was revived – inspired, ironically, by those early denunciations – in Bohemia and the Netherlands in the late 13th century, and had spread to France and northern Italy, one of a number of related millennialist sects that rejected the world as it was and sought to return to a simpler way of life.
Javier points out clues indicating that Bosch intended his work to be read, like Hebrew, from right to left. The big one is that the God in the Eden scene is clearly Jesus
– a young man, as opposed to the old one in the bubble – which of course doesn’t work in terms of the Adam and Eve story. And, he elaborates, if you read it that way “you obtain the perfect creed of the Adamites.” The ‘Hell on Earth’ scene really represents the state of the world as Bosch saw it in his own day. The central scene shows how he thinks we should be living: naked, free and communing joyously with nature, depicting, as Javier says, the “rites of purification” that the Adamites thought would save us and lead to “the arrival of the Kingdom of Jesus: a New World Order that will last a thousand years.”.
The triptych, with its dreamlike imagery and dramatic colours, was a seminal influence on the Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who spent days studying it and experienced a soul-shaking moment when one day, among the rocks in the Garden, he spotted his own face peering out. Javier explains: “For Dalí to see himself in the triptych had to be a kind of hallucinogenic experience, an epiphany. Suddenly he realised that he was predestined to reinterpret art from top to bottom. And so the seed of Surrealism was planted in him.” (For another Dalian epiphany, and a portal, see pp56-57.)
Adamite-type beliefs were certainly to be found around the Spanish court. The network of sects to which they belonged included the Familia Caritatis (‘Family of Love’), which held very similar beliefs and rejected the Trinity and baptism. Philip II’s official printer was a Familist, and several art historians have argued that Brueghel the Elder ( c. 1525-1569), whose paintings form part of the Prado’s arcanon, was another. So too was another favourite of Philip’s, El Greco, who is more widely recognised as a mystic and visionary:
Fovel describes him as “another artist for whom painting served principally as a repository of a revolutionary credo that prophesied the arrival of a new humanity and of direct communication with the invisible.”
LAS MENINAS
Much of the royal collection, which formed the basis of the Prado’s, was acquired and curated in the 17th century by DiegoVelasquez, including many of the works, such as the
Raphaels and Titians, whose meaning Javier was initiating me into. If there is an arcanon, thenVelasquez was its founder.
Javier shows me, in gallery 12, Velasquez’s Las Meninas ( The Ladies-in-Waiting) of 1656, one of the most enigmatic paintings ever produced for a royal patron, and one that has defied analysis for centuries. Velasquez himself features in it, standing behind a canvas and looking out at us. The normal order of things is reversed: we, the viewer, are in the place where the subjectVelasquez is painting stands, looking into his studio. A mirror on the far wall reflects that subject: the king and queen, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria.
The focus of the painting, though, is their infant daughter Margarita – at that time their only child – with her junior ladies-in-waiting, being kept amused by her dwarf Mari Barbola and a resigned-looking mastiff. The painting is about her and yet, strangely, that lookingglass reversal where we become the subject – the king? – and everything inside the painting hints at some other meaning.
Javier tells me about the work, in the 1970s, of another of his ‘masters’, Angel del Campo
of the Spanish Academy of Arts. Del Campo was struck by the fact that, according to the inventory ofVelasquez’s possessions made after his death, the majority of his books were about astrology. Faced with this evidence of his passion for that art, del Campo looked at Velasquez’s oeuvre with a new eye. He found that the figures in Las Meninas were arranged to represent the constellation of Corona Borealis: at that time, its largest star, represented here by little Margarita, was called Margarita Borealis. Moreover, joining all the characters in the painting outlines the sign of Capricorn.
Javier elucidates: “Why? Well, the only character here who was Capricorn was the Queen. She is in the reflection in the mirror, just beside the King, in the centre of the circle made by the sign. In 1656, when the painting was made, Spain was waiting for the birth of a new baby boy who could occupy the throne. The King was very old and the possibility of a “failure”, and with it the end of the dynasty, was high. According to Angel del Campo, Las Meninas was painted as a giant talisman to protect the royal marriage and to give them the good luck to generate a boy.”
If so, it was successful: against the odds, five years later, the future Charles II – known as ‘the Bewitched’ – was born, although this was something of a mixed blessing; as Javier points out, he was a very weak king under whom Spain lost much of its power and prestige.
THE PRADO’S MONA LISA
Naturally, I was especially engaged by the Prado’s own version of the Mona Lisa. It’s been there since the mid-17th century; how it got there is unknown, and although the first document referring to it describes it as “by the hand of Leonardo daVinci” it has long been regarded as a later copy of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Until 2012, that is, when restoration work removed the solid-black background to reveal a landscape exactly matching that of the Louvre original. This surprise discovery prompted a reappraisal, and the consensus now is that the Prado painting was produced in Leonardo’s own studio by one of his apprentices in parallel with the Maestro working on the real thing. Its market value leapt accordingly.
However, Javier makes some good points that suggest the original attribution could be correct after all. Most tellingly, the Prado
Mona is painted on expensive walnut, whereas the Louvre one is on cheap poplar: why, he asks, would the apprentice paint on the topquality wood while the commission is on the cheap stuff?
If Javier is right, it would provide an answer to one of the biggest puzzles (of many) about the Mona Lisa. According to the standard account it was a portrait commissioned around 1503 by the wealthy and well-connected Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo of his wife Lisa. But it was apparently never delivered: Leonardo continued working on it, and it was hanging in the room in France where he died 16 years later. Clearly it had a great personal meaning for him. Leonardo producing two versions – as he did with other works – one to fulfil the commission and another for himself, provides a neat solution to the question of the painting’s provenance.
THE INTERZONE
The intertwining of art and the arcane wasn’t just a feature of the Renaissance: it continued – indeed continues. It’s usually hidden, occulted, but it became overt in fin-de-siècle Paris, with the artistic and occult worlds openly cohabiting, most obviously in the Salons Rose+Croix, annual artfests organised in the 1890s by occultist and art critic Joséphin Péladan, founder of the Ordre du Temple de la Rose-Croix, which was both an esoteric and æsthetic society.
Artists, like poets, delve into the personal abyss of the unconscious
As explored in art historian Nadia Choucha’s Surrealism and the Occult, the 19thcentury Symbolists consciously employed concepts and imagery drawn from occult and magical systems, a symbiotic relationship that passed on to its successors, Dadaism and Surrealism. Occult-inspired artists include Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops, Kandinsky, and Klimt.
All this prompts the obvious question – which Lynn and I have been exploring for many years now – of just why esoteric and heretical imagery turns up in the works of so many artists from so many periods.
To a degree it’s explained by the mindset of the artist. The great painters didn’t simply want to produce an æsthetically pleasing picture that satisfied their patron. Painting, like poetry, is an expression of a deeper impulse, one that is ultimately about attempting to show reality as it is. And the great artists understand that reality is shaped as much by our inner perception as by what is objectively out there. They don’t just look outward, but within. And artists dislike limits. The artistic mindset is one that, almost by definition, takes the artist to places where they’re not supposed to go, exploring the forbidden. In a society that is religiously tightly controlled, that leads to heresy and magic. For artists in times of greater religious freedom, it was, instead, sexual taboos that were explored. And the occult: Choucha explains its attraction to 19th- and 20th-century artists as being “opposition and challenge to the Establishment, academism, and accepted values, conditions, and standards.’ 5
As Javier puts it in his novel, speaking of Raphael: “The Pearl’s creator had an innate opposition to rules. He was a rebel.”
But there’s still more to it than that. Artists, again like poets, delve into the imagination and the personal abyss of the unconscious, and when you go down there all manner of strangeness can happen.
It’s the same space inhabited by the magician. Which shouldn’t surprise us: as Carl Abrahamsson, editor of the ‘occultural journal’ Fenris Wolf, observes, art began as a magical act, with cave paintings. 6 The fictional Dr Fovel makes the same point: “If you go back 40,000 years ago, to when people were living in caves, they were already painting images on the cave walls as a way to gain access to other worlds.” In short, art is itself a magical technique. For Abrahamsson the essence of art is “instigating magical change through æstheticised personal expression”. 7
It has long been recognised that certain Renaissance paintings employed the same principles that were used in the magic of the time. The example that’s usually offered, to the point that it’s become something of a cliché, is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which is essentially a talisman invoking that goddess. Just asVelasquez’s Las Meninas is a talisman for Capricorn.
It’s not just about the artist, of course; works of art are intended to have an effect on the viewer, too. Paintings are designed to stir the imagination and emotions, which is what makes our response to art indefinable in mere words. Beyond that, though, they can be meditative devices, something most apparent in, but not exclusive to, religious works.
As ArthurVersluis, professor of religious studies at Michigan State University, puts it in his study of the relationship between art and mysticism: “Contemplative art draws us in toward the union of subject and object: by observing art, we participate in it, and that participation is also exaltation beyond our limited self.” He quotes a contemporary critic on Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes (1859), that it transforms the viewer into a “demigod”, provoking an “awakening into a higher consciousness”.
In other words, the contemplation of a painting is a way of entering an altered state. In magical terms, altered states aren’t just internal, but create a space – Gary Lachman’s ‘interzone’ – where things can happen in the external world. Paintings become, in the modern buzzword, portals. Javier sees this as the common thread connecting the arcanon’s paintings; they are “doorways to other worlds”. As Fovel says of The Garden of Earthly Delights: “You have to think of this painting as a doorway, a portal that will transport you to a transcendent state, or reality.”
After all, doesn’tVelasquez positively invite us to step into Las Meninas? As to whether that doorway is merely metaphorical – allowing us to enter a different internal reality – or can literally take us into another world... well, how long have you got?
TOUR’S END
Javier showed me many other paintings of fortean interest that day – Botticelli’s illustration of a ghost story in the three panels of The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, Brueghel the Elder’s zombie apocalypse in The Triumph of Death, which uses figures from Holbein’s eerie Alphabet of Death to spell out a coded message, and more – but space doesn’t allow me to go on. Most are detailed, and illustrated, in The Master of the Prado.
As we come to the end of the tour, I have to ask Javier the inevitable question: how much of the novel, both the encounters with Dr Fovel and the decoding of the arcanon, is fiction, and how much is real?
Javier replies candidly: “The book starts with a real memory: the unexpected meeting with an old gentleman in the Prado Museum galleries that taught a young Javier how to ‘read’ a painting. To be honest with you, I only met Dr Luis Fovel once, in front of Raphael’s Holy Family or The Pearl. That was the painting where I learnt the basis of the symbolic reading of the art of the Renaissance period. But Fovel became such an intriguing man for me that I decided to create a fictionalised biography for him and use him as the main character for my book.”
And the arcanon? “Fovel really talked to me about the ‘arcanon’, and that’s why I assume that he was part of a secret society of some kind, probably a Spanish branch of the Rosicrucian movement, but I cannot prove it.”
Taking our leave of the Prado and returning to Madrid’s bustling streets, I reflect that whoever – or whatever – that mysterious Doctor was, he found a worthy apprentice in Javier – who, judging by all that he has given me to think about – is now becoming the Master.
NOTES
1 In his foreword to Carl Abrahamsson, Occulture: The Unseen Forces that Drive Culture Forward, Park Street Press, 2018, ix.
2 English translation, The Master of the Prado, Atria Books, 2015.
3 See Geer’s 2014 lecture ‘Following the Blind Man: Marcel Duchamp and the Voodoun Connection’ at the Luminato Festival, Toronto, Canada: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbWjzPm09A; www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfvlzqog8U0
4 The German art historian Wilhelm Fraenger, in the mid-20th century, presented the case for Bosch as an occultist and Adamite, while Lynda Harris, graduate of the Courtauld Institute and Boston University and a specialist in Renaissance art, argues in The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch (1995) for a connection between the Adamites and the Cathars.
5 Nadia Choucha, Surrealism and the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy and the Birth of an Artistic Movement, Mandrake of Oxford, 1991, p126.
6 Abrahamsson, Occulture, p221.
7 Ibid., p. 51.
8 Arthur Versluis, Platonic Mysticism: Contemplative Science, Philosophy, Literature, and Art, SUNY Press, 2017, p120.
CLIVE PRINCE is a London-based writer and researcher, and the co-author with Lynn Picknett of a series of books that, in FT’s words, “specialise in topics that challenge established and cultural history”. They are best known for The Templar Revelation, acknowledged by Dan Brown as the inspiration for The Da Vinci Code. Their latest book is When God Had a Wife. See www.picknettprince.com and patreon/picknettprince.