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09/17/2007: "Hemingway's Greatest Love Was a Painting in the Prado" by Ron Butler
MADRID, Spain -- Author Ernest Hemingway was well known as a hot-tempered brawler, a barroom fighter, horseplayer and a hard drinker. His was a world of bullfights, deep-sea fishing and big-game hunting.So it's difficult to imagine his becoming smitten with a painting on a museum wall of a beautiful woman.
Think again.
Hemingway's favorite city was Madrid. And one of his favorite hangouts there was the Prado museum.
"Hemingway loved the Prado," says his biographer A. E. Hotchner. "He entered it as he entered cathedrals."
His favorite Prado painting was Andrea del Sarto's Portrait of a Woman. According to Mr. Hotchner, "She was the girl whom he had loved longer than any other woman in his life."
As a dedicated Hemingway fan and a dedicated Prado-goer, I decided to take a look at the painting.
Like Papa (the author's nickname), I'm always a little overwhelmed just entering the Prado. The 180-year-old museum with its pinkish, Neoclassic façade not only depicts the soul of Spain but mirrors it as well. Its corridors teem with craning schoolchildren, nuns and priests (the Prado's wealth of religious art makes it a shrine for the pious), licensed tour guides hotly disputing territorial rights with freelance entrepreneurs, artists, tourists and businessmen - art lovers all.
Sarto's Portrait of a Woman is in the Italian Renaissance section where it's immediately apparent why its beauty so captivated Hemingway, who was truly a lover of women. (He married four times.) But the portrait is not merely a painting of a woman. It's a portrait of the artist's wife, Lucrecia Baccio. Sarto (1486-1530) was a Florentine painter whose figures were simple and pure. His Last Supper is dwarfed in importance only by Leonardo's.
Baccio, the subject of the painting, was the wealthy widow of a Florentine hatter whom Sarto had used many times as a model for saints, virgins and Madonnas.
When Lucrecia's husband died, Sarto's interest became more than artistic. They were married in 1517. He was 31. She was 27. Sadly, history marks the marriage as the beginning of the artist's downfall, describing Lucrecia as "a beautiful but unscrupulous coquette," "a demanding and possessive partner." Ernest Jones, a pioneer in psychoanalysis, terms the artist's excessive attachment to his wife as "pathological uxoriousness," or about as submissive as you can get.
Their union came at a time when Sarto was gaining international acclaim and was joining the ranks of such Italian Renaissance masters as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.
So great was his reputation that he was summoned to the court of Francis I of France. When he returned to Florence, it was with a large sum of money the king had given him to buy Italian art for the French court. But once back in the arms of his wife, he used the money to build her a huge, beautiful home in Florence.
But these were bad times. Florence was overrun by troops. It was also fighting remnants of the plague.
Fearing for her safety, Lucrecia fled. Distraught over his wife's desertion and by the loss of so many of his paintings during the Siege of Florence, Sarto took to his bed, refused to eat and died shortly after. He was 43. Lucrecia lived well into her 70s.
In addition to the Prado, traces of Hemingway can be found at almost every turn in Madrid. The restaurant Hemingway enjoyed most was Botin's, just off the Plaza Mayor, where Jake and Brett took their final meal in the very last page of The Sun Also Rises. The restaurant is awash in 18th-century ambience, with beamed ceilings, hanging copper pots, tiled oven And walls covered with memorabilia. Hemingway went there often for roast suckling pig.
The domed Rotonda Bar at The Palace Hotel, across the street from the Prado Hotel, is still known as Hemingway's Bar, although the bar Hemingway frequented was originally closer to the hotel entrance and was a hot spot for pickups. But Hemingway's true love still hangs nearby in the halls of a museum.
The Prado is on Paseo del Prado. Hours: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission: about $8; free. Sunday. The Prado recently completed the most extensive expansion in its 200-year history, doubling exhibit space by nearly 50 percent.. Contact: 011-34-91-330-2800; http://muesoprado.mcu.es/ihome.html.
For information on Spain, contact Toureist Office of Spain in New York (212-265-8822), Miami (305-358-1992); Chicago (312-642-1992), or Los Angeles (323-658-7188) or go to www.spain.info.
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Ron Butler is the author of DANCING ALONE IN MEXICO, a travel narrative published by the University of Arizona Press and now heading into its third printing. He lives in Tucson.
