I've found a way to make museums less boring

Telegraph

02-03-2025

You've been in the museum for an hour and, despite trying valiantly, your concentration levels are starting to wane. Dates are swimming in your head; names, places and historical events are getting jumbled up. You want to ask a question, but the guide is focusing on his monologue and you are in any case struggling to understand his less-than-perfect English.
You are suffering from Museum Head. You see the symptoms in every gallery and museum, every day of the year. Groups of tourists zombified with sightseeing fatigue. Eyes glazed, backs aching, tummies rumbling. We've all been there. No matter how fascinated or committed we may be, trying to absorb so much new information about so many dazzling works of art quickly becomes debilitating.
I have a solution. The way to avoid what should be a highlight of your trip becoming a back-to-school endurance test is really quite simple. Focus on fewer things and – most important of all – choose a theme. By following a single story, a historical character, the life of a particular artist, facts will fall into place far more easily. Instead of a jumbled overview, your visit is transformed into a fascinating detective story. One which can often be extended beyond a single museum to cover other sites around a city.
It takes energy of course, especially if you do your own research. But there are easier ways. Recently, I tried out a new offering from a cultural tours company – The Luminaire – which has put together a Goya-themed tour of Madrid. It's expensive, partly because it is a collaboration with the Ritz hotel, so you have to book a stay there in order to do the tour. But what you get for your money is a highly-focused experience based around the life and works of one of Spain's – and Europe's – greatest painters, Francisco de Goya.
He was a brilliant artist with a compelling life story, working his way up from a modest working-class background to be appointed painter to the king. The tour, led by Dr Carlos Bayod, weaves a narrative of Goya's life through guided visits, not only to the major churches and museums where you can see his most famous works, but also some much more niche, normally private sights where Bayod has arranged special access.
One advantage of the Goya theme is that it is not only an insight into his art, but also into one of the most tumultuous periods of Spanish history. The decades between the 1780s and the 1820s, when Goya was working, were when the Spanish Inquisition still held sway, when Napoleon occupied the country, and when a mild-mannered royal family was succeeded by an embittered, reactionary king.
But it was also a time that saw periods of liberal government and moments of hope – such as in 1812, when Wellington marched into Madrid at the head of a liberating army. It was Goya who painted Wellington's portrait to mark the occasion, Goya who had recorded the 1808 rebellion against the French, and the brutal punishment shootings that followed on May 3.
It was Goya, too, who portrayed three generations of the royal family, from the good-natured Charles III to the vengeful Ferdinand VII. The famous pair of Maja paintings, where she is shown both naked and clothed, were commissioned by the prime minister Manuel Godoy in the 1790s and, probably, depict his mistress.
These portraits are all in the Prado along with Goya's first royal commission, an epic series of cartoons of hunting and rural scenes, which were to be used to make wall tapestries for the king's country retreats. They fill six rooms on the top floor of the museum with light and colour and optimism. And Bayod supplements them with a fascinating private visit to the archives, workshops and conservation studios of the Royal Tapestry Factory, which first worked on the designs and is still operating nearly 250 years later.
Back on the first floor of the Prado, the mood darkens as Bayod describes the repressive regime of Ferdinand VII that threw Goya into a deep depression. The artist had all the trappings of wealth and success, but when he retreated to his villa, just across the river from the Royal Palace, he decorated the walls with the stuff of his nightmares. Now known as the Black Paintings, they were saved for the Prado when the villa was demolished in the 19th century.
Goya never intended us to see them, but they remain some of the most powerful images in art history. Bayod's tour includes a private visit to the Factum Foundation, where he works. Here he has undertaken a study of the Black Paintings – whose display in the Prado is highly conjectural – to try to understand how the artist might originally have planned the sequence of frescos.
I seem to have concluded my cure for Museum Head on a dark note. But at least I felt enlightened rather than confused.
How to do it
Nick Trend was a guest of the Mandarin Oriental Ritz hotel's Exclusive Journeys experience. The Goya tour costs from £4,520 per person, B&B for two nights and tours on three days, based on two guests sharing and including private transfers.
Goya's Madrid
If you want to research and put together a Madrid Goya tour yourself, here are the key sights to base it around:
Hermitage Chapel, Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida
Goya made the frescoes in this small church in 1798 to impress the king and although the central figure of the frescoes is St Anthony, it is the supporting cast of angels covering the niches, arches and lower parts of the ceilings that also catches the eye. They are dressed in the latest court fashions. The artist's control of perspective and his sense of how to balance the composition is extraordinary. Here too is Goya's tomb – his body was brought back from his original grave in Bordeaux in 1919, but mysteriously, his skull was missing.
San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts
A fellowship here was a prerequisite to getting the commissions from the royal court that Goya so desperately craved. He had tried for admission twice before he was finally accepted in 1780. Two of his best self-portraits hang in the galleries, as does the great 1801 portrait of prime minister Godoy. It is also home to a complete collection of Goya's satirical etchings. The Luminaire tour includes a private tour of these and a visit to the Calcografía Nacional upstairs, where prints are still made from the original etching plates.
The Royal Palace
The brilliant ceiling frescoes in the throne room here, which Tiepolo painted in the 1760s, give you a clear picture of the grandeur of the Spanish court in Goya's time. But for an insight into the royal characters, you need Goya's portraits, and four of his greatest still hang here: the double pairings of Charles IV and his queen – two in relaxed pose (the king wears hunting garb and the queen a mantilla) and two in formal regalia.
The Prado Museum
The Prado is home to most of Goya's greatest paintings. It opened as a museum in 1819, when he was living in Madrid. It seems that he was too ill to attend the opening but it's inconceivable that he wouldn't have called in at some point, since many of his key works were already on display.
The Líria Palace
This grand pile, set in acres of its own gardens near the Royal Palace, is the Madrid residence of the Dukes of Alba, Spain's foremost aristocratic family, which has been at the centre of power in the country for centuries. During that time, the Albas amassed probably the world's greatest art collection still in private hands, including seminal works by Goya – who had an extremely close, possibly romantic relationship with the 13th Duchess of Alba – and paintings by Titian, Rubens and all the great painters of the Spanish Golden Age – Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo and El Greco.
The palace and its collection was opened to visitors for the first time in 2019 and even then only on rather stiff and restricted guided tours which gave you little time to look at the paintings. All that has now changed. An initiative by the Duke's eldest son Fernando and his wife Sofia, has opened the palace to a dramatic installation by the irreverent Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos. She has delighted in displays of some of her most extravagant works, among them a pair of giant shoes made from stainless-steel saucepans which dominate the ballroom, an enormous Valkyrie made of fabric and flashing LED lights which is suspended above the main stairs and a piano sheathed in crochet in the music room. I defy you not to smile as you walk round.
At the same time many of the restrictions have been lifted so that you can now visit and enjoy both the contemporary art and Old Masters much more freely than before.