A Harsh Beauty  Revising the Escorial, plus the wonders of
Wonder Bread  By Benjamin Schwarz  El Real Monasterio de San
Lorenzo de El Escorial, known simply as the Escorial—royal
palace, monastery, basilica, seminary, library, art gallery,
tomb—stands north of Madrid on a bleak plain of boulder and
pine, 3,000 feet up, at the base of the icy Sierra Guadarrama.
David Watkin, in his authoritative A History of Western
Architecture, declares this colossal, severe, rectilinear
edifice “surely one of the wonders of the modern world.” Built
for Philip II between 1563 and 1582 of blue-gray granite
quarried from the surrounding mountains, it measures 675 feet
(nearly two football fields) by 530 feet (one and a half
football fields), and contains 100 miles of corridors, 4,000
rooms, 16 courtyards. Its 2,673 windows pierce the cold grandeur
of its unadorned walls. It holds 45,000 books, 5,000 manuscripts
(many in Arabic), 1,600 paintings (Philip was among Titian’s
most avid patrons), and 540 frescoes.  But even as the E