ABSTRACT
Isidora's visit to the Prado amounts to a very brief scene in a very long novel. However, placed as it is at the start of Isidora's urban life and rich in resonances throughout her story, the scene encapsulates the visual and spatial paradigms that govern the novel's urban action. The aesthetic as well as the ideological hegemony of the museum is elaborately undermined by the narrative itself without major interferences from the narrator - in at least two different moments of this chapter, bracketing Isidora's presumably uncontaminated contemplation of the works of art and their palatial lodgings. Within and without the novel, museum showrooms and shop windows were lending themselves to significant interactions at the time of Isidore's inaugural walk through Madrid's center.
