30 MARCH13, 2022
I spent a long time looking at the piece. Something about
Cotán’s life story connected with me. In his 40s, one year after he
painted that still life, the artist had some sort of midlife crisis. We
don’t know why — though, apparently, a bunch of people owed him
money for paintings. Whatever the reason, in 1603, he closed his
workshop, renounced the world and entered a Carthusian monas-
tery, where he lived a life of solitude, silence and contemplation.
After a few hours at the Prado, it was nearing 2 p.m. While the
museum is an institution that remains open during the siesta, I had
to meet François for lunch. So, I walked over to a nearby restaurant
called Angelita, where he was waiting for me.
François insisted we order tomatoes as our first course. “These are
the best tomatoes you will ever eat in your life,” he insisted. There are
not many times in life where someone says something so hyperbolic
and it turns out to be true. That two-hour lunch was among the most
memorable meals I have eaten in the past several years. And those
tomatoes! They were a variety called Corazón de Buey that were
grown in Zamora at the family farm of Angelita’s owners. They were
so red, so meaty, so juicy, that one bite brought tears to my eyes.
Is it ridiculous to say that the most exciting, inspiring thing I did in
Spain was eat a tomato? Hemingway certainly would not have been
impressed. But in that moment, I reflected on what the audio tour in
the Prado had said about the 17th-century still lifes, that “one could
see the creative hand of God in even the most trivial of objects.”F
rançois and I plotted a road trip that would take us to Spain’s
northeast, to La Rioja and Basque Country. The original plan
had been to go to Pamplona for the famous Festival of San Fermín
and its annual running of the bulls. Even though I knew Pamplona
would be a ridiculous touristy mess of Hemingway-induced testos-
terone and role-playing, I figured I should see the spectacle once in
my life. But months before my trip, San Fermín and the bullfights
had been canceled for the second year in a row (the last time the
festival had been canceled for consecutive years was during the
Spanish Civil War in the 1930s). No bulls for us.
Before I left Madrid, I visited the Prado Museum, alone, while
François did some work. The Prado is one of the world’s greatest art
museums, full of grand masterpieces by Goya, Velázquez, El Greco,
Rubens, Titian, Bosch and countless others.
There I came across Juan Sánchez Cotán’s “Still Life With
Game, Vegetables and Fruit,” a strange painting from 1602 depict-
ing a cupboard with small birds attached to a cane, three lemons,
seven apples, a goldfinch, a sparrow, two partridges and a white
thistle-like vegetable called a cardoon — all set against a deep black
background. Cotán is considered the inventor of the Spanish
bodegón painting, simple, austere still lifes of pantry items. Only six
of his paintings still exist. The objects in the painting, according to
the audio tour on my headphones, “are precise and sober, and at the
same time, poetic and strange. They highlight everyday simplicity.”