Javier Sierra (Teruel, 1971) belongs to that select Club of writers who have turned the publication of each new book into an event, or at least in a great editorial bet: with ‘The Master Plan’ (Planet), which leaves tomorrow to The sale with an initial run of 250,000 copies, the author has gathered about thirty journalists at the Prado Museum to travel behind closed doors and explain some of the hidden messages in their paintings, Always of diffuse meaning, which he has used in this novel, with which man continues to expand that kingdom of the mystery that is his work, and how well it works. Sierra, one of the usual faces of ‘Fourth Millennium’, a long career communicator, planet prize in 2017 with ‘The Invisible Fire’, was the first Span of the year in the United States (he did it with ‘the secret dinner’). To date, they say from its editorial, it has sold more than seven million copies. That is your league.
“I don’t see pictures, I see novels,” Sierra releases shortly after entering the Prado Museum and presenting himself as a shaman for one night: that wants to be, he insists, a guide that uses the images to tell stories, to expand looks. «The paintings need stories that accompany them, need stories. Without stories, the paintings are nothing, they are nothing more than a passing image that you forget just like a post on Instagram ». And there goes the first. It is 1990 and Javier Sierra is a journalism student who passes the afternoons in the Prado, fascinated. One day, in front of ‘La Perla’, by Rafael, a strang of the artist ». He never knew his name, he never saw him again, he never forgot.
«Then I discovered, because I did not know that then, that this kind of appearances of, in quotes, ghosts in the museums are common in some large gallings. The Louvre, for example, has its own ghost called Belfegor, which a television series that became very famous in the sixties. In the Uffizi they also have one of these ghosts, ”Sierra tells ABC. «By the way: in ‘La Primavera’, by Botticelli, which is in the Uffizi, precisely, in the middle of the canvas there are two human lungs disguised in the branches of foliage. But Botticelli, theoretically, could never have seen some lungs because it was forbidden to make autopsies to the bodies. That was necromance, I was very persecuted. However, Botticelli undoubtedly participated in an autopsy. And he wanted to encrypt that way for those initiated in his painting ». Then he will say that Miguel Ángel hid a human brain in the layer of God in ‘The creation of Adam’, as suggesting that God was an idea …
Twenty -three years after that mysterious encounter in the Prado, the stranger without the name of Dr. Fovel, one of the characters of ‘The Prado Master’ who also appears in ‘The Master Plan’. «The funny thing is that later I discovered that in ‘La Perla’, by Rafael, there is a dry trunk in a corner. I had seen the picture hundreds of times, but I hadn’t noticed that detail. And in that dry trunk, in addition, a capital’s ‘f’ can be seen. And that initial is not from the artist or the patron. It will be the ‘F’ of Fauvel », jokes.
In the 56A of the Prado, Sierra explains before the ‘Garden of the Delicias’, of El Bosco. He says: “The nudes of this painting were a provocation.” He says: «In this room the guards say that they feel guarded, as if someone looks at them even when the museum is empty and continues to patrol it. And the truth is that it is so. Someone looks at them in this room. The Bosco disguised a giant eye within the composition of ‘The Garden of Delicias’. He wanted to instinctively imply that the paint looks at you … the eye is in the central table. In the part of the upper lake, which has an oblong shape and has that blue source in the center, which is a pupil. If you see it from afar and refile, it is an eye and the pupil follows you ». Soon, Sierra points out a stone in the left part. “When Dalí saw this, he said:” The Bosco prophesied me. ” With a little imagination or intention, the stone could be Dalí’s more or less surreal profile. And in ‘The hay car’ there is a fish man who reminds him of the Oannes myth, which met in Europe long after the death of El Bosco …
On the way to the black paintings, from Goya, Sierra briefly stops in the face of ‘the descent’, by Van der Weyden: “I have so much respect that I dare not write about him.” At minute, he says: “In the meadow there is no thirteen room, as there is no thirteen row in the planes.” Finally, already surrounded by Goyas, it evokes an anecdote that a reader named Luis Oliva told him. «His mother went out with a Prado guard. They were other times and the child played here, for this museum, every afternoon ». One day, in a mistake, the museum closed and he stayed inside. When the adults realized and went to look for him, he swore that Goya’s ‘semi -spoken dog’ turned and looked into his eyes. But yesterday the dog seemed innocent.
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