A sage on YouTube!

"The expression of those who walk in the art galleries reveals a poorly disguised disappointment at the fact that there are only paintings hanging in them." When we thought that the boom of immersive exhibitions had proved Walter Benjamin's phrase right, we discovered that the great museums had not said their last word and continued to talk on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube. So much so that the Prado has just won the Webby award for the world's best art and culture initiative.

The Internet is full of people explaining things and commenting on them. The advantage of an institution like the Prado is that it speaks firsthand. And not only when it comes to its big stars (Las Meninas, The Garden of Earthly Delights). It is enough to click on the multimedia section of Raphael's Transfiguration (in the copy of Penni that hangs on the ground floor) to get hooked on a brief but fascinating film: not the one that tells the restoration of the painting, but that of the panel that makes it the heaviest painting in the museum: 558 kilos. Hardly an amateur could do something like that from home.

At home, in a meadow in the Alentejo or on a street in California, Alejandro Vergara has recorded the videos of his YouTube channel: Historias de cuadros. The difference is that Vergara is not an amateur but the Head of Conservation of Flemish Painting and Northern Schools of the Prado itself. Seeking to distinguish between scholar and sage, W. H. Auden said that dry scholarship is as useless as learning the Manhattan telephone book. Wisdom requires intuition and the ability to relate, know and look. Without technical fanfare and in just 10 minutes, with Vergara's Historias de cuadros we manage to appreciate the synthesis between idealism and realism in Las hilanderas, understand Mondrian's debt to Vermeer or, thanks to a still life by Clara Peeters, discover the enormous economic value of salt in the seventeenth century or the symbolic value of a simple table knife: When you were invited to eat at someone else's house, you brought your own cutlery.

It takes a lot to know to illustrate the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation with the rotund left hand and with the electric curls of Rubens' St. Paul. In times of doubt, the artist offered forcefulness. Hence its enormous success. In his commentary, Alejandro Vergara, a world expert on the painter, points out that the saint does not seem a Christian martyr but a pagan god. Art allows it to be both. So it was for many who treated him in life. Anyone who went to Mass last Monday would listen to the account of the Acts of the Apostles (14:1-18) that records his visit to Lystra with St. Barnabas. After contemplating their miracles and healings, the Greeks of Asia Minor took them for Hermes and Zeus. Days later, they were stoned. We have 2,000 years of confusion and tension. It's not all the fault of social media.

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