The writer Elena Poniatowska did not need to take licenses when she fictionalized the life of Leonora Carrington, a woman whose artistic trajectory cannot be separated from her eventful biography. The Celtic legends she read as a child in her family’s neo-Gothic mansion in England, the Renaissance frescoes she discovered when she was sent to a boarding school for young ladies in Florence, the bohemian circles she was introduced into by Max Ernst, her admittance into a psychiatric asylum in Santander after being raped, and her exile in Mexico all took shape in the fairy-tale world that we can see for ourselves at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid until 7 May.