Madrid’s golden triangle

Under the statue of Charles III in the Puerta del Sol a hellfire preacher is competing for custom with a mariachi band. ‘Porque la paga del pecado es muerte!’ he shouts. ‘Ay, ay, ay, ay,’ they sing, ‘porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones.’ The weather is with the preacher: the cielo is not lindo. The El Greco cumulonimbus overhead flickers with lightning as God adds a rumble of thunder to the mix.

Apart from the angry heavens and the five police vans lined up opposite — for prevención, they tell me — there’s little sign that Spain is on the brink. The leaning towers of Bankia may be tottering, but to judge from the queues outside the Prado the culture industry has not been affected. On a free Sunday evening they stretch around the block, so I plump for the airy spaces of the fee-charging Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza at the northern apex of Madrid’s ‘golden triangle’ of galleries.

When Baron ‘Heini’ Thyssen Bornemisza chose Madrid as a permanent home for his art collection in 1992, he saw a gap in the market. The Spanish don’t go in for one-stop shops. Madrid is peppered with small specialist outlets — a Casa del Fumador, a Casa del Bacalao, a Museo del Jamòn, even a shop dedicated to violet sweets — and its only department store is called El Corte Inglés. Unlike our National Gallery, the Prado makes no attempt to be encyclopedic. The result of four centuries of royal collecting, its holdings are full of art-historical gaps which the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza helps to plug.

The 800 works on display in the neoclassical Palacio de Villahermosa on the Paseo del Prado offer a shorter encyclopedic introduction to western art from the Italian Primitives to American Pop.