‘The pictures, they look at you.’ A stroll with novelist John Banville through Spain’s Prado Museum

MADRID — It’s the eyes peering from the canvases that get him, their gaze piercing the boundary between art and life.

That’s why acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville prefers to visit Spain’s Prado Museum during its opening hours — even though he’s been invited to browse anytime as part of a month-long literary fellowship.

Still, he doesn’t want to be alone with the multitude of watchers hanging from the walls of the labyrinthine galleries.

“I don’t like coming here after hours, it’s too eerie. The pictures, they look at you,” Banville said turning away from the glare of Diego Velázquez himself looking down from the Spaniard’s greatest work, “ Las Meninas.”

The huge 17th-century painting shows the Infanta Margarita, her young ladies-in-waiting, a dwarf, a buffoon with a dog, a nun, a mysterious man exiting through a door, a mirror reflecting King Phillip IV and his queen — and also Velazquez, stepping back from his canvas and looking straight down at the viewer.

The painting — a paragon of Baroque sophistication — has fascinated generations of artists. Banville, with his love of poetic detail, is no different.

“I find that ‘Las Meninas’ is always a surprise to me, and a challenge,” Banville told The Associated Press during a recent stroll through the Prado.

“It’s the enigma of it, the strangeness of it. Every time I look at it, it becomes stranger again,” he said, surrounded by throngs of museumgoers. “Velázquez looks at you, saying, ‘Look what I did. Would you have been able to do anything like this?'”

Banville’s privileged access to the Prado — including after hours and off-limits areas such as its restoration workshops — over the past month is part of the museum’s “Writing the Prado” program.

The program, sponsored by the Loewe Foundation, started last year and counts Nobel prize winners John Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk, as well as the Mexican American author Chloe Aridjis, as its first fellows.

The fellows immerse themselves in the museum over four weeks before producing a short work of fiction published by the Prado with the editorial guidance of Granta en español magazine.

Banville, author of the Booker prize winner “The Sea,” the recent “The Singularities,” as well as popular crime novels, has an inkling of what he will write following his deep dive into the Old Masters.

“I haven’t worked out the details,” he said — but it’s about someone going through the gallery and about those…