ROYAL RARITIES

By Simon Hunter

The acclaimed writer will make the Prado his centre of activity and ‘contempla-

PAINTINGS, tapestries, sculptures, decorative art pieces, armour and weapons, and royal furniture collected by Spanish monarchs will be put on show at a new museum. It opens at Madrid’s Royal Palace on June 28 and will feature collections dating back as far as the Middle

The inaugural exhibition will feature 650 of the more than 150,000 pieces managed on behalf of the government by Patrimonio Nacional, including works by Velazquez, Goya, Caravaggio, Titian and Tintoretto.

In a joint venture with the Loewe Foundation, it is inviting internationally renowned writers to engage literarily with the museum’s collections. tion’. This summer. He will write a story related to his time at the Prado, the first of a story collection that the Museum will dedicate to exploring the potential for creative expression at the crossroads of fiction and the visual arts.

JM Coetzee, born in South Africa in 1940, has published nineteen works.

He is regarded as one of the most acclaimed and decorated English language authors.

Much of his work questions apartheid, under which he grew up, and challenges all forms of racism.

He now lives in Australia, where he is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

He’s also had visiting appointments over a long academic career, at US universities such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford.

The newly discovered dinosaur has been identified from a partial skeleton – the right upper jawbone, one tooth, and five vertebrae.