CWT Journal – August 17, 2026 / Prado Museum, Madrid

After sleeping in and fueling up with a relaxing breakfast, we headed downtown for a private tour of the Prado Museum with Monroe, an amazing art-history guide who made the paintings—and especially the artists behind them—come alive.

We learned that Jusepe de Ribera wasn't just a great painter; he was associated with Naples' infamous Cabal, a group accused of intimidating rival artists—Monroe described him as something of the Vito Corleone of the Naples art scene. Caravaggio was a brilliant but spectacular train wreck who fought, fled, killed a man, and died mysteriously at only 38 or 39. Peter Paul Rubens, meanwhile, essentially figured out how to scale an art business 400 years before business school: a huge workshop of assistants helped execute his designs, allowing him to produce an extraordinary body of work.

We loved Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son—a horrifying image that can be read as power or society consuming its own—and discovered that the Prado has a second Mona Lisa, painted by one of Leonardo da Vinci's pupils at the same time Leonardo was painting the original!

Finally came Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights—which was strange and wonderful enough that we decided our next dog should be named Hieronymus—and Pieter Bruegel's equally bizarre and macabre The Triumph of Death, which Dad may have loved even more.

Today proved that art museums become considerably more interesting once you realize the people who made the masterpieces were often every bit as fascinating—and dysfunctional—as the rest of us.