When the monster's jaws appear

Some of Titian's 'poems' that are exhibited in the exhibition 'Mythological Passions', in El Prado.Carlos Álvarez / GETTY IMAGES

Love has ever been compared to war.

Surely because seduction forces us to establish tactics and strategies to conquer someone, but perhaps also because in love there are victories and defeats, as in war, and that a victory can later translate into a loss, or vice versa.

The Prado has brought together in

the six

that Titian painted on behalf of Philip II, inspired by the

by Ovidio, and has accompanied them with 23 other works to display a dazzling ensemble that invites you to peek into those drives full of lights and shadows that tragically mark the human condition. That is why the gods appear in many paintings, to underline the ephemeral nature of our existence, and to show what Ovidio already held, and Carlos García Gual recalls in

that “everything is transformed, nothing perishes”. There are moments of joy and there are moments of prostration, and there is brutal violence as there is the calm that happens to ecstasy of love. "The world is in perpetual change," says García Gual, "but everything remains completely identical."

Creatures continue, it is true, with their things until they die, and the gods remain there, intervening when they please to twist the lives of mortals. In the works in the Prado exhibition that terrible tension that pulls upward and, at the same time, precipitates downward seems present everywhere. Venus stretches out her arms to tie Adonis and keep him by her side, but the boy is dragged by his dogs because the obligation of the hunt is calling him and he has no other, so he tries to get away from her. The capricious goddess wants to continue frolicking, she knows that a wild boar is going to kill her lover, but he has to continue with his efforts. The tear between pleasure and duty gives the measure of so many tears. And then death.

The myths have that, that they mix the movements of ordinary people with the affairs of those idle and heartless gods. As if they were busy explaining in a very pedagogical way the exact place that humans have: to be no more than toys of chance, clumsy utensils with which divinities entertain themselves. Actaeon, for example, has in another of Titian's poems the rare privilege of breaking into the place where Diana bathes naked and thus gaining access to the intimacy of the goddess. It will be of little use for him to discover such beauty: Titian has painted in the painting the skull of the deer in which Actaeon is going to be turned by his daring; to be eaten later by their own dogs.

Pull up, rush down: the urge to redeem yourself, the temptation to fall. These two impulses are what mark the bars of life, and Titian masterfully deploys both movements in dealing with the myth of Perseus and Andromeda. The chained woman wants to rise, the young man descends to fight the monster and save her. This is where you have to look, at those jaws that try to devour everything. They are always around the corner, and in Madrid they have established themselves in politics with the help of Vox, which has turned bad manners and anger into their hallmarks, and the destruction of some projects as their raison d'être shared: the fight against climate change and for gender equality, ties with Europe. Exaggerating the inks, and with the gods entangling, the myths portray us.It is time to fight the monster.