Thanks to his friendship with the Cádiz collector Sebastián Martínez, who had a large and well-stocked print cabinet, Goya had a vivid awareness—again, through prints and reproductions and the occasional copy—of English portraiture and genre painting: William Hogarth, William Blake, Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Flaxman, and others. Many of the traces of neoclassical design that appear in Goya’s graphic work come, consciously or not, from Flaxman, who was also one of the chief inspirations for Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery designs. Otherwise Goya cannot have been well aware of what non-Spanish artists were doing in the course of his lifetime, because their work was much less copiously engraved. Of manifest importance to him was English caricature—James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Hogarth—whose violent distortions of form and fearlessly scatological humor were to affect Goya’s first great print series, the Caprichos.
All this was very chancy, very unsystematic. The mechanisms of exchange of information that we take for granted as routine aspects of the “art world”—traveling exhibitions, easy access to collections, public museums, art publishing, mass reproduction—hardly existed in Goya’s Spain. He made one journey to Italy, as a very young man fresh from the Spanish provinces; but although a meager sketchbook has survived from that hegira, it tells us very little of his itinerary, or what he saw, or whom he met, or what paintings made an impression on him.
He spent the last few years of his life in France, in the city of Bordeaux, which he chose more for political and family reasons than for cultural ones; he visited Paris, but one can only guess at what he might have seen there or what he thought of it. By then he was in his eighties, frail (though still, according to those who knew him, intensely curious about the life around him), and as deaf as a post. Probably he could not speak more than a few words of French.
He did not win international fame in his lifetime, or for many years after his death. In the late nineteenth century, a succession of French, English, and German artists based their aspirations as realists on their enthusiasm for Velázquez; gradually, for some, Goya’s work then took over as a standard and model. (The two were not mutually exclusive, of course; Manet was only one of a number of major painters who adored them both.) From about 1900 on, Goya was one of the few Old Masters—and a recent Old Master at that—to be exempt from the polemical rejection of the past felt by many younger artists. He was, in a real sense, the last Old Master; and in an equally real sense, the first of the Moderns.
Yet when he died, in 1828, none of that would have made sense. He had few admirers and, what is even more surprising, practically no imitators anywhere in Spain. He lived in exile and obscurity, in France. Liked by the Bourbon king Carlos III, loved by his son Carlos IV, Goya was not liked a bit by the next Bourbon, Fernando VII, who was restored as king after years in exile, having been thrown out by Napoleon’s occupation of Spain between 1808 and 1814. Fernando suspected Goya of disloyalty and in any case preferred the stiffer, smoother Neoclassical manner of his own chief court painter, Vicente López. After 1815, after Goya had served the Bourbons as chief painter for so long, it was as though he had gone into eclipse, his great etching series mostly unpublished (the fate of the Desastres de la guerra and the so-called Proverbios, or Disparates) or lapsed into semi-obscurity (as happened to the Caprichos); his drawings unknown; his paintings scarcely visible to the public except for three pictures in the Prado, two of which were royal portraits of the Bourbon monarchs he served, Carlos IV and Queen María Luisa. (Today, apart from drawings and prints, the Prado owns some 150 of his pictures, though not all are genuine, a fact that its curators will sometimes admit to in private without wishing to go on the record about it. A striking example is the Milkmaid of Bordeaux, a painting done very late in Goya’s life, which is accepted with joy by everyone who doesn’t know his work well and rejected by many who do—including some of the curatorial staff of the Prado, who cannot yet take the risk of demoting such a popular picture.)
At the time of the Bourbon restoration, the catalog of the Prado, which had only recently switched from being a museum of natural history and become a picture gallery (one of the few permanent blessings with which the otherwise detestable archreactionary Fernando VII endowed Spain), did not even list Goya’s great monuments to Spain’s rising against Napoleon in 1808—his paintings of the rebellion of May 2 and the reprisals of May 3—though the Dos de Mayo was celebrated all over Spain in song and verse as the country’s national day.
Outside Spain, he was just as poorly known. A set of his fiercely moralizing Caprichos was offered by a London bookseller in 1814 for twelve pounds; a few years later, nobody had bought it and its price was reduced to seven guineas.5 Britain’s National Gallery did not acquire any Goyas until 1896, and in a famous fit of moral hysteria the greatest art critic of his age, John Ruskin, actually burned another set of Caprichos in his fireplace, as a gesture against what he conceived to be Goya’s mental and moral ignobility.
SUCH AN IDEA seems very odd today; if nothing else could make you sense that Ruskin was cuckoo (and he was; as mad and depressed in old age as King Lear himself), this peculiar deed would. Yet it is not entirely out of keeping with common, popular images of Goya, all of which turn out, on inspection, to be false: invented, mistaken, or the result of accretions of legend. It is not so long ago, for instance, that most people who thought about Goya considered him mad. The assumption was based on Goya’s deep interest in insanity, which can readily be deduced from some of his Caprichos, from the indisputable fact that he painted a number of madhouse scenes and was almost the first European artist to do so, and from the dark, enigmatic paintings that adorned his last home in Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo. But this is illogical. It is like saying Hieronymus Bosch was possessed by the devil because he painted such vivid and influential images of hell. Goya was fascinated by madness for two reasons. The first was that he shared the general interest in mental extremity that characterized Romanticism in European art. What was the human mind capable of when at the end of its tether? What images would it throw out, what behavior would it release? In this sense, Goya was no more mad than Shakespeare when he wrote the “mad scenes” for Lady Macbeth and Ophelia, and created the sublime, terrible, and fragmented utterances of Lear. Almost all the great artists of Goya’s time, from Fuseli to Byron, were fascinated by madness, that porthole into unplumbed depths of character and motive. Goya was in some ways the greatest of all delineators of madness, because he was unrivaled in his ability to locate it among the common presences of human life, to see it as a natural part of man’s (and woman’s) condition, not as an intrusion of the divine or the demonic from above or below. Madness does not come from outside into a stable and virtuous normality. That, Goya knew in his excruciating sanity, was non-sense. There is no perfect stability in the human condition, only approximations of it, sometimes fragile because created by culture. Part of his creed, indeed the very core of his nature as an artist, was Terence’s “Nihil humanum a me alienum puto,” “I think nothing human alien to me.” This was part of Goya’s immense humanity, a range of sympathy, almost literally “co-suffering,” rivaling that of Dickens or Tolstoy.
Was he some kind of a peasant touched by genius, as some writers have thought? Of course not: Goya may not have been a painter-philosopher like Poussin, and there may be some justification to the view once expressed that his letters are like those of a carpenter, but carpenters are not so dumb, and appearances can be most deceiving. Goya was a very smart and sophisticated man, not only in his handling of the issues, techniques, and meanings of his art, not only in his relationship to the art of others, but in the conduct of his daily life.
It was not easy to be a court artist. It required serious diplomatic talents. It offered no enforceable contracts, and an artist had to be constantly, minutely vigilant to keep himself not only from shooting himself in the foot but from being stabbed in the back by rivals or unsuspected enemies. Royal patronage was very much a matter of whim. It was even harder to be an arti
st who served several successive kings, the aristocracy around them, and the prepotent and often jealous figures of their successive administrations—with, all the while, the Catholic Church and its Holy Office, the Inquisition, looming in the background and sometimes barging threateningly into the foreground. Goya was not a manipulative man. He could do a little flattery when necessary, but he was not servile. He possessed, in the highest degree, the virtue of natural common sense, which the Catalans call seny. His mental posture was upright; his carriage, fairly relaxed. Though his letters to Martín Zapater, his friend since childhood, may not disclose the deeper layers of his emotional life (for most people around 1800 that was not what letters were for), they do reveal a man reasonably at ease in the world, free from humbug and cant, loyal to his friends, loving to his women, and deeply protective of his relatives and dependents; a natural señor with a great appetite for life, an equal talent for living it, and without any weird twist to his backbone. As John Russell wrote of Eugène Delacroix (who, not incidentally, loved Goya’s work and was the first French artist to collect it), he “is one of the most cogent arguments for the human race.”6 But do not take Goya for granted. He was a great man but not necessarily a nice guy. He was tough, prickly in defense of his hard-won prerogatives. And the last half of his life was lived out under the shadow of a crippling disability that must have made him suspicious, jumpy, and, above all, given to overcompensate for loneliness: the dreadful and unconditional loneliness of the deaf man, cut off from others and therefore bound, inevitably, to be suspicious of their motives.
GOYA WAS BORN on March 30, 1746, in the remote village of Fuendetodos in the kingdom of Aragón. From this, many people have assumed that he was a country boy who rose from obscure peasant origins to his position with the Spanish court, as official painter to three consecutive Bourbon kings: Carlos III, the “enlightened” liberal; his son Carlos IV, the stolid, blue-eyed cuckold; and his son in turn, that tyrannous weasel Fernando VII. In fact, Goya was nothing of the sort. His origins were obscure enough, but his father, José Goya, was neither a farmer nor a farmer’s son. Nor did Goya reside in Fuendetodos: he and his family lived about forty miles away (or three days’ journey over the vile Aragonese roads) in the medium-sized city of Zaragoza, the provincial capital of Aragón. José Goya was the son of a small-town notary—not an exalted rank, it is true, but in eighteenth-century Spain’s class system a hundred times better than tilling the soil. It entitled him and his children, Francisco included, to be treated as members of the lower middle class rather than as peasants or farmers. Francisco was José’s fourth child. The first had been a daughter, Rita, baptized in Zaragoza in May 1737; the second, a son, Tomás, baptized in December 1739; the third, a daughter, Jacinta, baptized in September 1743. Then came the future painter, in 1746, followed by a third son, Mariano (baptized March 1750), and a fourth, Camilo (1753).
José Goya had not followed his father into the practice of law. He had settled for being a craftsman—a gilder, not a bad trade in a culture that produced a constant demand for every kind of gold-leafed object, from decorative putti and candlesticks to picture frames and whole altar retables. At the center of this steady market for religious and decorative craftwork was the principal church of Zaragoza: the shrine, later proclaimed to be a cathedral, of Santa María del Pilar—the Virgin of the Pillar. For Spanish Catholics, this place was of great cultic significance. It commemorated the supposed vision granted to the apostle St. James the Greater (Santiago to his Spanish devotees), to whom the Virgin Mary appeared in Zaragoza near the banks of the Ebro in A.D. 40. She exhorted Santiago to evangelize the whole Iberian peninsula, converting its peoples to Christianity, then presented him with an effigy of herself and a column to stand it on—which is supposedly preserved in the church, where the faithful dutifully kiss it. The apparition of the Virgen del Pilar thus became tied in with the “liberation” of Catholic Spain from the civilization of the Arabs, which had begun with the implantation of Islamic rule there in 711. Hence the cult of the Virgin, the Pillar, and Santiago was of vast iconic importance to Spanish Catholicism, and one of its chief centers was a Gothic church, similar in style to the Cathedral of Albi, built in Zaragoza in 1515 on the spot where the Virgin supposedly made her appearance.
Basílica del Pilar, Zaragoza (illustration credit 2.4)
At the end of the seventeenth century, work began on a newer, larger, and even more splendid sanctuary. Goya’s father was in charge of its gilding and part of its ornamentation. The Bourbon monarchs took a particular interest in protecting and pushing the whole project; Carlos III’s favorite Spanish architect, Ventura Rodríguez—later to be a friend and ally of young Goya’s—drew up the plans for the Chapel of the Pillar, which was built between 1754 and 1763. The king’s chief decorator, Antonio González Velázquez, a disciple of the Italian painter Corrado Giaquinto, was put in charge of the ornamentation of its dome. The building of Nuestra Señora del Pilar was no provincial affair: it was one of the largest ecclesiastical projects in progress anywhere in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. Working with its designers—admittedly, as their subordinate—gave José Goya a steady, if not necessarily intimate, contact with artists and with other craftsmen, which implies that his son Francisco was exposed to a high level of professional life as well. It is a mistake to imagine that young Goya came from under a cabbage leaf, armed only with a kind of peasant genius. This is an invention of his early biographers, including, rather surprisingly, the son of his lifelong friend and correspondent Zapater, who ignored most of the discoverable facts of Goya’s childhood.
Goya’s father was a tradesman, whose family roots went back to Basque ancestry. His mother, however, belonged to the lowest order of nobility, that perhaps most useless rung of eighteenth-century Spanish society, the lesser hidalguía. To be a hidalgo, male or female—the term was a contraction of hijo de algo (son of somebody)—conferred no particular privileges beyond prestige. It was a social concept invented by rapacious monarchs of the past to raise money. You bought the title, cash down. Owning it entitled you to certain minor perquisites, all to do with courtesy. The main one was that it entitled you to be addressed as “Don” or “Doña.” No matter if the servants had deserted, the kitchen roof was tottering to the ground, and the very hens had abandoned the fowl yard, you were still an aristocrat of sorts. Starting with Columbus in 1492, all the expeditions of Spanish world conquest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the Canaries to the Caribbean and thence to the rim of the Pacific, had been staffed—and many of them led—by hidalgos, which helps explain not only the rapacity with which the conquerors behaved but their parallel obsession with titles. The same held true in the civilian sphere at home in Spain: it accounts for the inflation of titles so common under Carlos III and his successors, and so ridiculous to the outsider’s eye. What, exactly, did it mean to be called the Marquis of the Royal Transport? What was Carlos III’s purpose in founding an Order with his own name that boasted, at the outset, two hundred knights? Only one answer seems possible: the gratification of an illusory sense of prestige that was sustained by no measurable achievement. One Spaniard in twenty—half a million people—claimed hidalgo status, and this privilege was more often an intolerable burden: the hidalgo could not do useful work, and since most had no inherited money or interest-bearing capital, this restriction made them little better than beggars. Goya’s mother, Gracia Lucientes, seems not to have been averse to this, and her sense of hidalguía—of being something of a nob by birth—left its traces in her painter son: in his later preference, for example, for being known as Don Francisco “de” Goya.
The house in Fuendetodos was her family’s property, a cottage, a stone box, the remnant of once larger landholdings. It is not known why she gave birth to this particular son there. Her other children were born and baptized in Zaragoza, and all of them were raised there. It is possible that José had been called to Fuendetodos to gild the altarpiece in its parish church (which was set up
in 1740) and that his very pregnant wife went to stay with him while he completed this long job, and so gave birth to Goya there; but certainly the documents of the day show that around 1746 the Goya family was well and truly established in Zaragoza.7
RELATIONS BETWEEN ARAGÓN, whose capital was Zaragoza, and the more recently established kingdom of Castilla (whose centrality in Spanish politics was not confirmed until the accession of Fernando and Isabel in the late fifteenth century) had not always been easy. Traditionally, Aragón was in league with Cataluña, whose capital, Barcelona, had been a great Mediterranean power when Madrid was not much more than a cluster of mud huts. For centuries the Catalans and Aragonese had expressed their ideal of the relationship between their own count-kings and the central powers of Madrid in a pithy and exceedingly conditional oath of allegiance, recited by the justicia or high judge of Aragón to the monarchs of Barcelona and Castilla. The oath was seen as almost insultingly haughty but would not bear editing: “We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws—but if not, not.”
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