While most of the nearly eight thousand daily visitors to the Prado Museum stand (or not) before the character in the background of Las Meninas de Velázquez, the hand on the chest of the gentleman who painted El Greco or the fat meat. From Rubens' The Three Graces , a peculiar detective examines, frame by frame, all the plants that grow unnoticed in the most prominent paintings in the gallery.
Eduardo Barba, gardener and botanical researcher in works of art, with his inseparable monocle, and dodging the warnings of the room watchers, has spent years writing in his notebook all the species that cross on his walk through the painted garden of the Prado. Thus, it has managed to inventory 1,100 works in which it has identified almost 600 species. Part of that meticulous work has been collected in his first book: The Prado Garden (Espasa), published in mid-February. Through 43 selected paintings, the author makes his personal botanical tour of one of the main museums in the world.
Barba undertakes with this book a particular crusade against the blindness that, in his opinion, the human being experiences in front of plants, especially those that appear in works of art. "We are capable of not paying the slightest attention to the botany that surrounds us incessantly, even being in the middle of a forest, that blindness is also transferable to the art world," says the researcher.
The English term plant blindness was coined by botanists James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler in the late 1990s. In their Preventing Plant Blindness study, they highlighted the growing ignorance and lack of appreciation in the young population of the United States towards the plant world and the preference for the animal world.
It is, on its small scale, the same cognitive bias that has historically been applied to the representation of women in art, their role within the scenes, and their presence and appreciation as artists. A gap that the Prado Museum itself recognizes on its website without much self-criticism, and this year it tries to fill the exhibition with the invited guests . It is also denounced by Peio H. Riaño in Las Invisibles , the essay he has just published and in which he reports the numerous rapes, humiliations and submissions in which women are represented in the museum, without any question from the institution no clear mention in the cartels of the works.
The details against collective plant blindness
Whether due to disinterest or the inability to perceive the stimuli and benefits of plants, the reality is that, despite their omnipresence, they go unnoticed by a large part of Earthlings. Faced with this phenomenon of collective plant blindness, Eduardo Barba makes a strong defense of the value of details and the importance of developing an attentive look towards the world around us. Concerned about the distortion produced by the virtual, his formula tries to find in art the trace of the real through plants. "We have varied the time of contemplation. Art has taught me to stand in front of a work and contemplate it no matter what else, neither the time nor what happens around it," he explains.
It all started five years ago with Patinir and his Rest on the Flight into Egypt : "I was caught by botany and encouraged to identify the plants of the Prado Museum, all of them. When I realized, I had more than 30 species listed and I have not been able to stop until today. " In this time he has cataloged all the works in which there is some species represented, more than a thousand among pictures, sculptures and decorative arts.
During his immersion in the museum's backdrops, he discovered painters who paid attention to detail, artists who, after powerful characters and intense scenes, stopped to represent small plants between the holes in a wall or on the background landscape behind a window. "Sometimes they are small brushstrokes that do not look like anything, but in fact they accurately draw a poppy or a gate of the nymphs, plants that grew at the feet of masters like Tiziano or Velázquez. Other times, painters like Brueghel used energy to paint large trees as identifiable as oak. "
This researcher of small herbs in large paintings has rescued countless plants from the dark angle of art, convinced that the Prado is a full and flowery garden. Despite the fact that most of them have not noticed it, and the posters of the works do not pay attention to them either, the gallery is full of botanical details with more or less intention. Carnations, marigolds, mallows, poppies, violets, mulleins, roses, millenramas and lilies dot the museum's works. Also strange plants that seem that they can only grow in the imagination of an artist like in Bosco.
The most common and the rarest plants
Ivy is the most represented plant - in more than 160 works - and the rose, the most repeated flower. As for trees, stone pine, oak, cypress or laurel are very common. Within this botanical variety, for Eduardo Barba "as important is a tomato as a marigold, each one is just as beautiful in its field".
For this botanist, the representation of the vegetable kingdom is essential in the ability of art to question the viewer and move him to recondite moments and places, "there are landscapes by Claudio de Lorena where I am still there, contemplating them. In The Annunciation by Fra Angélico , sometimes it gives you the feeling that the blades of grass continue to grow. There are countless roses whose petals you could almost touch with your fingers and you even find paintings that impregnate you with odors, such as the fragrant grass that Patinir recreates in El paso de la Styx lagoon . "
Each artist had a motivation to include one or another plant in their paintings and in a more or less realistic way, from the decoration for pure aesthetic desire to the symbolic value to complete the message of the work. The religious symbols are the most frequent, is the case of the tiny daisies that appear in The Crucifixion , by Juan de Flandes. All are white, except for those that emerge from under the cross, in a reddish tone, as an allegory of the martyrdom of Christ.
Within the list of gardener painters, flamingos are the most precious. In paintings such as The Descent , Rogier van der Weyden's masterpiece, more than a dozen plants are represented. In The Fountain of Grace , in the surroundings of Jan van Eyck, a multitude of wild herbs grow, up to 20 recognizable species, along with some less realistic ones. Also hidden trees, ceramic fruits, stone leaves and thread flowers.
Despite this weight of botany in the Prado collection, the posters that explain the paintings hanging in its rooms hardly include plant references. The same occurs with artistic treatises in which plants, especially the less common ones, usually have a residual role. This emptiness can find its explanation in that widespread plant blindness, so deeply rooted in society, against which this gardener, convinced that plants are as important as art to know and understand the world, is fighting.