“Photos, they look at you.” A walk with writer John Banville through the Spanish Prado Museum.

MADRID — He is drawn to the eyes looking out from the canvases, their gaze penetrating the border between art and life.

This is why renowned Irish writer John Banville prefers to visit Spain’s Prado Museum during its opening hours, although he is invited to explore at any time as part of a month-long literary fellowship.

And yet he does not want to be alone with the many observers hanging from the walls of the labyrinthine galleries.

“I don’t like coming here after hours, it’s too creepy. The paintings, they look at you,” said Banville, turning away from the gaze of Diego Velazquez himself, looking down from the Spaniard’s greatest work, Las Meninas.

The huge 17th-century painting shows the Infanta Margaret, her ladies-in-waiting, a dwarf, a jester with a dog, a nun, a mysterious man emerging through a door, a mirror reflecting King Philip IV and his queen – and Velázquez standing back from the canvas and looking straight ahead at the viewer.

The painting, an example of Baroque sophistication, has fascinated generations of artists. Banville, with his love of poetic detail, is no different.

“I think Las Meninas is always a surprise and a challenge for me,” Banville told The Associated Press during a recent walk through the Prado.

“This is the whole mystery and strangeness of this phenomenon. Every time I look at it, it gets weirder again,” he said, surrounded by a crowd of museum-goers. “Velasquez looks at you and says, ‘Look what I did. Could you do something like that?”

Banville’s privileged access to the Prado, including after hours and into restricted areas such as restoration workshops, has been part of the museum’s “Writing the Prado” program for the past month.

The program, sponsored by the Loewe Foundation, launched last year and its first participants include Nobel laureates John Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk, and Mexican-American writer Chloe Arijis.

Fellows immerse themselves in the museum for four weeks and then create a short work of art published in the Prado under the editorial direction of Granta en español magazine.

Banville, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, the recent Singularities, and popular crime novels, has an idea of ​​what he’ll write after taking a deep dive into the old masters.

“I didn’t think through the details,” he said, “but it’s about someone walking through a gallery and those piercing eyes.

“The eyes follow him. And I think… all his life… he’s been afraid of being found out, and all those eyes seem to know it. And I think Velasquez is saying, “Yes, I know who you are.”

Frustrated artist painting with words

While his mesmerizing novel The Book of Evidence is based on a failed art heist, the narrator’s relationship with painting goes back to a troubled teenager tempted to pick up a brush as well as a pen.

“I didn’t know how to draw, I didn’t have a sense of color, I didn’t have drawing skills. This is a distinct disadvantage if you want to become an artist,” Banville said with a wry smile. “I painted some terrible pictures, oh God. If they ever come out, I’m doomed.”

Since then, he said, the verdict has become his brushstroke.

No photos please

More than 3.2 million people visited the Prado last year to admire its impressive collection of art from Spain’s golden age.

The 4,000 works of art on display, including the world’s largest collections of works by Velázquez, Rubens, Bosch, Goya, El Greco and Titian, as well as jewelry by Caravaggio, Fra Angelico and Bruegel the Elder, are just some of the 34,000 objects on display. find.

Prado offers solace to Banville and others who need an escape from the modern world: Taking photos with a phone or camera is strictly prohibited.

“This is wonderful. I see people walking around other galleries and just taking pictures, and I want to tell them: ‘Look at this damn picture’!” Banville said: “All museums in the world should introduce this rule.”

If Banville considers Goya’s ominous Black Paintings “too much,” the seductive ladies of Rubens’s Garden of Love, who he jokingly says are “made of bread dough,” won him over.

Another Velázquez catches his attention—or perhaps it is Banville, spotted by the evil drunkards in The Feast of Bacchus, where the god of wine is drinking with men drinking in their goblets.

In Madrid, Banville also allowed himself the first month to break away from the daily writing routine that he believes he has maintained since he began writing stories at age 12.

“This voice inside me said, ‘John, take a month off.’ Just enjoy it,” he said. “My family in Ireland were telling me how terrible the weather is and I’m sitting here having a glass of wine in the sun. I don’t dare tell them.

He is 78 years old and widowed three years ago, and he is not sure how many more books he has left. But the only thing that doesn’t bother him is artificial intelligence usurping the place of real artists.

“A work of art is a very rare thing. There are attempts to create works of art, and there are people who imagine that they have created a work of art, but this is just kitsch. Real art will not succumb to artificial intelligence,” he said.

“I believe that works of art are alive.”