It is a bright, chilly spring morning in Madrid, and the Museo del Prado doesn’t open to the public for another hour. Without the crowds, the museum is amorphous and eerily silent. A pale light pools in the corners and casts long shadows around the paintings, as if the figures inside them have slipped quietly into the room. It is here that I meet the French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani, who has spent the past two weeks using the space as inspiration for her work.
With quick strides, Slimani leads us to a basement gallery housing some of her favourite works: Francisco Goya’s dark and haunting Black Paintings, created later in life when the Spanish artist had adopted a particularly bleak outlook on humanity. Among them are Saturn Devouring His Son, a violent depiction of the god biting into his own child; The Fates, with its three ominous figures spinning the thread of life; and Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat), in which the devil appears as a goat presiding over a coven.
