Elder KM’s First-Person Field Guide to the
Macabre, the Impossible, and the Ornithologically Tragic
We travel not to escape life, but so that life does not escape us. Also, for the jamon. – Elder Claude
[ed. note: Big thanks to Elder KM for today’s BLOTT!]
I love Ukraine with all my heart; but there’s a close second nation vying for my geographic affections – Spain. In particular, the city of Madrid, where I spent an idyllic study abroad semester with the boy who turned out to be my soulmate, learned to be an adult, and broke the (Spanish) language barrier.
My semester in Madrid was a major inspiration for my current work at ENGin – the question I asked when designing our nonprofit’s model was essentially, “How can I replicate study abroad, but cheap?”
I have such fond memories of my time in Madrid that I wanted to go back and live there again. And that’s exactly what my family and I did for the last year.
Heading to Madrid, I recalled grand museum galleries, rich Spanish food (e.g. croquetas, potato omelettes, and churros), and relaxed afternoons turning into late nights laughing with friends over a glass of excellent wine which somehow still cost 3 euros.
Why didn’t I notice all the Madrid weirdness back then as a bright-eyed college student? And why did I notice it now? Could my years of membership in WLBOTT have had something to do with it?[2]
Regardless of the reason, each secret got me more excited about the next, and before long I was buying Madrid history books and wandering the streets looking for physical evidence of the stories within. So, without further ado, may I present a multi-part series on the secrets of Madrid. Each one true (or at least true-ish, which is the WLBOTT gold standard).[1]
Part I: The Horse That Should Have Fallen Over
One of Madrid’s major sights is the Palacio Real — a palace so large (3,000+ rooms) that you may need a nap halfway through your tour. Thousands of tourists flock there daily. But few bother walking around to the little park out front, where, in the center of the plaza, stands a bronze equestrian statue of King Philip IV, and it is doing something that, in the 1630s, was considered flatly impossible.
The horse is rearing.
Up on two legs. Front hooves clawing the air.
And the whole nine-ton monster is balanced entirely on those two slender back legs.
Nobody had ever pulled this off. Leonardo da Vinci had dreamed about it and never managed it. The standard, safe, boring method was to keep at least three legs on the ground, or prop the horse against a conveniently placed tree stump / dying enemy / allegorical turtle. A horse on two legs was a physics problem dressed up as a sculpture.
Enter the Nerd
Philip IV wanted this statue specifically because he wanted to out-flex his own father, whose statue (we’ll get there later) merely had a horse walking. Walking! Like a peasant! Philip IV demanded a rearing horse and, being king, felt no obligation whatsoever to explain how it should be done. He just wanted it. That’s the whole job description of “king.”
The King’s court painter, Diego Velazquez, had the easy job – a painting meant to inspire the Italian sculptor, Pietro Tacca.
Tacca had the unenviable task of turning the painting into reality. He sweated over it from 1634 to 1640 and eventually did what any of us would do when facing an impossible engineering problem: he wrote to the smartest person alive.
He wrote to Galileo Galilei.
Yes, that Galileo. Telescopes, moons of Jupiter, spent his golden years under house arrest for the crime of being correct about the solar system. In between all that, he found time to solve the riddle of a Spanish king’s horse.
Galileo’s solution was elegant: make the back half of the horse solid bronze and the front half hollow. Load the weight over the anchored rear legs. Shift the center of gravity backward. Let physics hold the pose that muscle never could. Plus, anchor the tail in the base for balance.
It worked. Galileo reportedly declared it would stand forever. And indeed, it has now stood for roughly 380 years.
The Punchline Nobody Tells You
Two of the greatest minds of the century — Galileo on the math, Velázquez on the original design drawing — collaborated on this monument to Philip IV.
And when Philip IV finally saw the finished statue?
He hated it. Said the face was all wrong.
Tacca, the sculptor, got very nervous. In those days, disapproval from a king could end very badly. But, luckily for him, Philip was feeling indulgent. “No wonder he messed up the face,” he told advisors. “He never got to meet me and see my handsome features in person.”
To fix the problem, Philip decreed that a local sculptor, one who could personally observe his lovely Hapsburg countenance, would finish the job. The head was lopped off and re-sculpted over roughly six months until His Majesty approved. So the statue spent its early life decapitated, waiting on a monarch’s notes.
WLBOTT Workplace Corner: You can assemble the finest team in human history, solve a problem Leonardo couldn’t, and defy gravity itself — and the client will still say “the face is wrong, do it again.” Revision is eternal.
Foot / Hoof notes
[1] We resemble that remark.
[2] Warnings
Warning: Extended exposure to WLBOTT may permanently alter one’s perception of history. Members frequently report seeing museums as comedy clubs, engineering problems as dinner conversation, and every bronze statue as the beginning of a very suspicious story.
We asked Elder G to psychoanalyze Elder KM’s remark:
That line has a wonderful “WLBOTT origin story” feel to it. It also captures something genuinely true about humor: once you train yourself to look for the odd, the delightful, and the slightly absurd, you start finding it everywhere.
I’d be tempted to lean into the joke just a bit more. Here are a few possible WLBOTT embellishments:
Why didn’t I notice all the Madrid weirdness back then as a bright-eyed college student? And why did I notice it now? Could my years of membership in WLBOTT have had something to do with it? I fear the answer is yes. Once you’ve attended enough WLBOTT meetings, your brain quietly begins scanning the world for stories involving heroic chickens, overconfident monarchs, and suspiciously dramatic horse statues. There appears to be no known cure.
Or, in the style of a medical warning:
Possible side effects of prolonged WLBOTT membership include:
- Noticing architectural oddities.
- Laughing at historical footnotes.
- Wondering whether seventeenth-century sculptors held auditions for horses.
- Imagining Galileo carrying a tape measure and muttering, “Move the center of gravity back another six inches.”
- Seeing perfectly respectable cities as collections of future blotts.
My favorite, though, is the simplest:
Could my years of membership in WLBOTT have had something to do with it? Almost certainly. WLBOTT doesn’t make the world weirder. It merely hands you a better pair of glasses.
That last line feels surprisingly apt. The world has always been gloriously eccentric. WLBOTT simply teaches its members where to look.
Our WLBOTT research department spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find a photo of this horse’s backside (to locate the three anchoring points). Luckily, the research team is not paid by the hour – or paid at all.
BUT… they finally find a photo on Google street view.
Open Casting
There is some historical evidence[citation needed] that sculptor Pietro Tacca held an open casting call for the bucking model used in King Philip’s statue.
Semi-Sequitur: Mariana of Austria
Mariana of Austria was the second wife of King Philip IV. They wed when she was 14. She was one of the most powerful women in the world, but she knew sadness; only two of her five children survived.
The Equestrian Statue of Philip IV (Estatua ecuestre de Felipe IV) was completed in 1640, when Mariana was only six years old.
Mariana of Austria (24 December 1634 – 16 May 1696) was Queen of Spain from 1649 until her husband Philip IV of Spain died in 1665. Appointed Regent for their infant son Charles II, she remained an influential figure until her own death in 1696.
Wikipedia
Semi-Demi-Sequitur
The Mariana Islands and the Mariana Trench were named after Queen Mariana.
The Mariana Trench is the deepest oceanic trench on Earth, located in the western Pacific Ocean, about 200 kilometres (124 mi) east of the Mariana Islands. It is crescent-shaped and measures about 2,550 km (1,580 mi) in length and 69 km (43 mi) in width. The maximum known depth is 10,935 ± 6 metres (35,876 ± 20 ft; 5,979.3 ± 3.3 fathoms; 6.7947 ± 0.0037 mi) at the southern end of a small slot-shaped valley in its floor known as the Challenger Deep. This makes the deepest point of the trench more than 2 km (1.2 mi) farther from sea level than the peak of Mount Everest.
At the bottom of the trench the water column above exerts a pressure of 1,086 bar (15,750 psi), approximately 1,071.8 times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level or eight tons per square inch. The temperature at the bottom is 1 to 4 °C (34 to 39 °F).
Wikipedia
2 replies on “Secrets of Madrid: Part 1”
A very interesting blott. Q: what does one have to do (or be) to have a trench named after you?
We set the bar low, and keep lowering it. Hence, trench.