Activists tape hands to Goya frames in the Prado: Spanish police

Activists tape hands to Goya frames in the Prado: Spanish police

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Two climate activists each taped a hand to the frames of two paintings by Spanish master Francisco Goya at the Prado Museum in Madrid on Saturday, police said.

The protest did not damage either painting, but protesters scrawled “+1.5°C” on the wall between the two artworks in a nod to the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Both activists were arrested, the police said.

The climate activist group Extinction Rebellion has posted a video online showing the two activists, each with one hand fixed on a painting, before museum security officials move inside.

The group said the two artworks in question were “The Naked Maja” and “The Clothed Maja.”

The action was a protest at rising world temperatures that “will create an unstable climate with grave consequences for the entire planet,” the group said in a statement in Spanish.

It is the latest in a series of similar protests by climate activists targeting famous artworks in European cities.

On Friday, a group of pea soup splashed on a Vincent van Gogh masterpiece in Rome.

‘The Sower’, an 1888 painting by the Dutch artist depicting a farmer sowing his land under a dominant sun, was displayed behind glass and undamaged.

According to media reports, four activists were arrested.

Last Generation climate activists called their protest “a desperate and science-based cry that shouldn’t be taken as mere vandalism.”

They warned that the protest would continue until more attention was paid to climate change.

Other promotions have used cake or mashed potatoes in recent weeks.

They are after masterpieces like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre in Paris or “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague.

In October, the group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup over Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at London’s National Gallery.

All of these paintings were covered with glass and undamaged.

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