The last museum for the day and the last in the capital is the Museo de Ballas Artes, the Fine Arts Museum. It is housed in a imposing building and it is the last we visit because it is open late and we can do it only after we have taken our relative to the airport in the afternoon. Luckily our relative has already visited it so she will not miss anything.
One floor is dedicated to what we expect to find in the museum, religious and more classical paintings. It is quite large and empty it feels we are the only people on this floor.
We skip relatively fast past the religious section, the more Biblical inspired paintings are fine but those of angels and saints only interesting from the point of view of the technique because we do not know enough about them to care one way or the other.
The next section is more interesting with paintings of birds and animals, it is fun to guess if the painter ever saw the bird or animal in real life or just painted based on a fanciful description.
There are a few halls dedicated to war art, we find especially funny to see almost side by side one showing how the Guanches were killed in war and one in which they were welcoming the Spanish and Christ with open hands, wonder which is the accurate representation?
The landscape paintings are actually quite good and we spend some time admiring the various paintings in this section.
And then somehow we are in a modern section with more weird paintings that we have fun trying to interpret besides the official interpretation if it exists.
There is also a section with odds and ends and lots of small landscape paintings all grouped together on a wall.
A weirder section is the one with death masks. A death mask shows the likeness of a famous person’s face after their death, usually made by taking an impression from the corpse. An interesting one is the one from Dante Aligheri, likely a copy but still interesting.
Weirdly the temporary exhibit is also about masks, really quite simiar to death masks in our opinion. However no one died for them, as far as we know, and they are painted or posed in different poses, quite an interesting idea. And with that we are done with the museums for the day and it is time to look for a place to eat, if we can only found open tables.
