Anton Raphael Mengs, Self-portrait, c. 1775. Oil on panel, 102 × 77 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. (illustration credit 3.5)
In doing all this, Carlos III was repeating a pattern that he had already set in Italy. During his twenty-five-year reign in Naples he had commissioned a number of distinguished buildings, including the enormous royal residence of Caserta by Luigi Vanvitelli, who was in effect the director in charge of Carlos’s tastes. He had also set up crafts foundations under royal patronage, such as a tapestry factory to supply decorative hangings for Caserta; a factory at Capodimonte (1743) for producing the clear, white, soft-paste porcelain ware of that name that Carlos took such pleasure in; a majolica factory; and a workshop for pietre dure (hard-stone intaglios and mosaics). He now did essentially the same in Madrid, creating the Buen Retiro porcelain factory and staffing it with trained ceramicists imported from Naples. He underwrote a royal factory for glass, another for decorative hard-stone work. His own taste in painting was not so good, but he had the advantage of his wife’s, which was somewhat more informed and refined. In 1759 Maria Amalia asked the Neoclassicist painter Anton Raphael Mengs, a friend of the “father of German art history,” Johann Joachim Winckelmann, to come and work for the court in Naples. It was an invitation not to be refused, since the recent excavations at Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748) made a visit to Naples irresistible to anyone, like Mengs, with a scholarly interest in the Greco-Roman past. In some respects the move to Naples, for an ardent Neoclassicist who believed in the purity and intensity of Greek models as against the frivolous vulgarity detected in the Rococo style, may have been a letdown: what did all that profusion of Pompeian quasi-porn, the randy goat gods, the walking scrotums and flying cocks, the dirty jokes in bronze, have to do with the “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” that Winckelmann (and with him, Mengs) believed was the essence of classical art? The fact was that Mengs did not stay in Naples. He followed his patrons to Madrid almost immediately.
Seventeen fifty-nine was the year Carlos of Naples inherited the Spanish Bourbon throne, becoming Carlos III of Spain. (His queen hardly outlived the change; she died in 1761.) The royal couple set Mengs to work on the Palacio Real in Madrid, where he was to replace Giaquinto on the decoration of the new King’s Apartments. From 1761 to 1769, and again from 1774 to 1776, Mengs was the most active official painter in Madrid—the man whose approval almost any other artist was going to need if his career at court was to prosper. The only painter who did not need his imprimatur was the immeasurably more talented Giambattista Tiepolo. Compared with Tiepolo, Mengs was a frigidly correct pedant, but in the 1770s the gathering fashion for Mengs in particular and Neoclassicism in general made Tiepolo look like the man on the way out: superficial, too pleasing, facile, and, thanks to his obvious (and gracefully discharged) debts to Paolo Veronese, more than slightly derivative.
It would be hard to imagine two more different painters working for the same court: Tiepolo, the unrivaled decorator and master of sumptuous caprice, and Mengs, the laborious moralist fixated on Parnassus. Mengs is one of those artists who enjoyed, in life, a fame and power that seem totally inexplicable after his death, and it extended all over Europe, not just provincial Spain. Stolid, correct, devoid of charm, insipid where strength was needed, dogmatic where fancy might have helped, thumped into shape as a “prodigy” by a failed-artist father and relentlessly promoted by the theorist of Neoclassicism, Winckelmann, whose leaden flights of pederastic dogma make even the longueurs of modern “queer theory” look almost sprightly—Mengs was one of the supreme bores of European civilization.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Power of the Spanish Monarchy, 1762-66. Fresco. Palacio Real, Madrid. (illustration credit 3.6)
No question, Tiepolo was ten times the painter Mengs could ever be, and he produced the best of the works commissioned by Carlos III for the Royal Palace: the “Great Work,” as Tiepolo called it, for the throne room, whose modello (the largest and most elaborate he had ever done, except for the 1750 sketch of Apollo and the Four Continents for the stairwell ceiling of the prince-bishop’s palace in Würzburg) he had brought with him from Venice to Madrid in 1761. “It is enough to reflect that it is one hundred feet [long],” he wrote to a friend in Italy in 1762; “all the same, I would like to think that the completed idea will be well adapted and suited to that Great Monarchy—certainly a heavy task, but for such a Work one needs courage.”9 The eventual result, a huge affair, was by far the most elaborate fresco ever done by royal commission in Spain: its theme, wrote Francisco José Fabre, the author of its earliest description, was “the majesty of the Spanish Monarchy, exalted by poetic beings, attended by virtues, and surrounded by its diverse states.” The whole shebang, in fact, including figures of Hercules (strength), Apollo (wisdom), Mercy, Abundance, Generosity, Amiability, Faith, Fortitude, Hope, Prudence, Victory, the various conquered colonies of South America, not forgetting Princely Glory (a lady with an obelisk inscribed with Carlos III’s name), the Spanish Monarchy itself, and several figures of Crime, Terror, and Fury who, in the spirit of ilustración promoted by the king, are being banished by torch-waving cherubs signifying the Light of Human Reason.
Mengs gave Goya official help and encouragement. Tiepolo, however, directly influenced his art. It was an odd juxtaposition, since it would be difficult to imagine, at the end of the eighteenth century, two artists more unlike one another fostering the career of a third. Certainly, Goya was closer to Tiepolo than to Mengs. What Goya recognized in Tiepolo was his abundant appetite for fantasy and caprice. The older Venetian master had an unflagging power to produce scherzi (imaginative games) and capricci that bore no relation at all to the frigid Neoclassicism of Mengs. Tiepolo liked to let his imagination bubble and run, without much regard for the coherence of narrative stories. He loved the mysterious, the exotic, the image all’orientale, full of curious props and fabrics, Gypsies and magi and deliciously sexy nudes. He also populated his crowds—those swirling, spectral, and sometimes hard-to-read assemblies of fleeting figures—with darkly comic oddities, people who seem out of place or period or in some other way anomalous: just as Goya did. The most famous of all Goya’s etchings outside of the Desastres, plate 43 of the Caprichos—the man asleep and dreaming on a writing desk while owls and bats flap and flutter about him to remind us that el sueño de la razón produce monstruos, “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters”—had its origin in the frontispiece to Tiepolo’s suite of etchings the Scherzi di fantasia (c. 1743-57), the stone slab in the wilderness with nine ruffled-looking owls hooting and spreading their wings on and around it, which Goya would certainly have seen in Madrid.
Goya, Los caprichos, plate 43 El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (“The sleep of reason brings forth monsters”), 1796-97. Etching and aquatint, 21.6 × 15.2 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 3.7)
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Title page (unlettered) of Scherzi. Etching. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (illustration credit 3.8)
For Goya, though, Mengs was more than a stylistic influence: he was a patron. Even more important, he was an active agent of Carlos’s patronage. By 1773, Tiepolo having died three years earlier, Mengs’s fame was such that, according to one English observer, “not to admire him was almost a violence against Church and State.” No mere Spanish artist would omit to admire Mengs openly and vociferously. To do so would scarcely please the king, who depended heavily on Mengs’s advice and opinions.
Carlos III was raising new, bare walls at such a rate in his various palaces that he needed a constant flow of new décor, so Mengs, followed by Goya’s in-law Francisco Bayeu and their friend Mariano Maella, kept Goya at work at the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara, turning out paintings and cartoons that served as designs for tapestries. Between 1775, when he joined the tapestry factory, and 1792, when he left it under the cloud of his fatigue and gathering illness, Goya produced scores of designs, some to mura
l scale and all woven in Madrid. That such projects could be undertaken there at all must have been a source of some pride to the royal household: in earlier days the cartoons would have had to be sent to France, to be woven at Gobelins.
Their subject matter was essentially narrative and popular in tone. Goya’s cartoons were not scenes from mythology or eulogies of great moments in Spanish history: they were genre pieces, quite complex sometimes, but almost always lighthearted, telling stories about current events and manners in the modern Spain of Carlos III. In fact, their colloquial lightheartedness seems to have been aimed far less at the pious and serious-minded king than at his son, the prince of Asturias and future Carlos IV, and the prince’s Italian wife, Maria Luisa of Parma, who loved the popular theater—as Carlos III most emphatically did not. Like hunting, music, and other diversions, it was for them a blessed relief from the stuffy confines of palace etiquette. The closest literary and dramatic parallel to the cartoons Goya made for the royals was the work of that most prolific of Spanish playwrights, Ramón de la Cruz (1731-94), which enjoyed an unflagging popularity with the Madrid public. His favorite form was a peculiarly Spanish one: the sainete, a kind of sketch, usually in one act and rarely lasting more than twenty-five minutes. The name derives from sayn, which originally meant the fat of a wild animal or the tidbits (such as the brains or liver) given as a reward to falcons from their retrieved prey: a small treat, then, for the theater audience. Cruz is thought to have written as many as 400 or even 450 of these. Unsurprisingly, not all of them have survived, but the most popular open a window into the cultural conventions, morals, and manners of late-eighteenth-century Spain in general and Madrid in particular. It was a window that Goya, who adored the theater and was in many ways its son, took great advantage in looking through.
Artist unknown, Portrait of Ramón de la Cruz. Biblioteca Nacional España, Madrid. (illustration credit 3.9)
GOYA LOVED POPULAR CULTURE, and the sainetes were among its most vivid expressions. This did not endear them to the guardians of elite culture, whose views Carlos III favored. They reached a majority audience (relative, of course, to the size of Madrid, which in the late eighteenth century was a small town compared with London or Paris), but it was not a refined audience, and for the ilustrados that lack of refinement was, in part, directly attributable to the influence of the sainetes themselves and of their shorter cousins, the musical comedies, or zarzuelas, so named because they made their first appearances in the 1650s at La Zarzuela, a royal hunting lodge near the Pardo palace. The playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760-1828), a Spanish follower of Molière and very much an afrancesado, took the opportunity to inveigh against Cruz in a memo to Manuel Godoy in 1792.10 Why, he asked, had Spanish theater collapsed into vulgarity, indignity, mere crowd-pleasing? Because it was content to mirror
the life and customs of the most miserable rabble: tavern keepers, chestnut sellers, pickpockets, imbeciles, rag sellers, blackguards, jailbirds, and, all in all, the disgusting doings of the Madrid slums: such are the characters of these pieces. The cigar, the gambling house, the dagger, drunkenness, dissipation, abandonment, all the vices of such people rolled together, are painted in seductive colors.… If theater is the school of behavior, how can one correct vice, error, and absurdity when the same people who ought to be amending them are propagating them?
These sainetes, he went on, were even corrupting the “highest levels of society” with their indecent actions and foul language, and “if the low people of Madrid retain an impudent and ferocious boorishness that makes them frightening, blame the theater for it.”
To this moral froth-blowing, Ramón de la Cruz riposted that he was not a degenerate but a realist: he wrote life as Madrid lived it, and his plays were not invitations to vice but social documents.
Those who have walked in his meadow on the feast day of San Isidro, who have seen the Rastro in the morning, the Plaza Mayor on Christmas Eve, the old Prado by night; those who have danced in the company of every kind and condition of person … in a word, those who have seen my sainetes cut down to the short running time of twenty-five minutes … let them say whether or not they are true versions of what their eyes see and their ears hear.11
One thing that Cruz, most popular of Spanish dramatists, could certainly not claim was any particular subtlety in his characterization. Working at top speed for what we would now call a mass audience, he had to concentrate on drawing vividly recognizable types rather than carefully nuanced individual characters; on broadly sketched stories, not intricate plots. He had, after all, less than half an hour per show. So he deployed a veritable army of “types.” There were regional ones, like the stage Frenchman, the gallego (native of Galicia), the Basque, the Italian, the Swiss, and the indiano, who was not an “Indian” but, rather, a Spaniard, or the descendant of one, who had made his fortune in Spain’s South American colonies. Other types were sorted by social standing: the semi-noble but impoverished hidalgo, the better-off lords and ladies known as usías, the husband, the wife, the widow, the bride, the cortejo (the gallant or, in today’s slang, a “walker”), or the petimetre, majo, and maja (of whom more later). Still other types were classified by work and office, from chestnut vendors to masons, from the orange seller to the flower girl, the cobbler, the scribe, the lawyer, the constable, the page, the footman, and the hairdresser.
THE WORD petimetre derived from the French petit-maître, but you had to be Spanish for it to fully apply. The petimetre was a bundle of pretensions: manners, clothing, language, all were judged (by him and others) in terms of their success in aping French and, to a lesser degree, Italian manners and artifices. The satirical papers and the comic theater of the time were full of him. He was an unending source of satirical possibility—a helpless but indefatigable fashion victim, a narcissistic fop who wanted to be everything that “real” Spaniards were not:
A giant buckle and a tiny shoe, shining white stockings, no socks, skintight knee breeches. A green English suit. Magnificent buttons with miniature portraits on them, a white embroidered waistcoat, a curly wig, a short pigtail … a cravat that covers the neck with a cascade of muslin, scented waters, snuff, a scarlet cloak, plenty of aplomb, and lots of money.12
The grooming of this paragon must match his tailoring. His day begins with two hours of shaving lather, soft soap, pomades, perfumes, rice powder, little pins and big ones, tweezers, a touch of rouge on the cheeks and two artfully placed lunares, or beauty spots; some work with the wig, and soon one would be off to the paseo (stroll) on the Prado, the promenade, on which no museum had yet been built but where all Madrid, from nobleman to beggar, took the air. The petimetre should have two watches, not one, both laden with alarms and chimes, the better to impress people with the urgency of his affairs.
For José Cadalso, whose Cartas marruecas (Moroccan Letters) were an unfailing source of mirth to socially skeptical madrileños in the later reign of Carlos III, the petimetre was one of the archetypes of Bourbon Spain. (The Moroccan Letters are so called because they pretend to be a three-way correspondence about Spain and its odd customs, conducted between Gazel, a newly arrived Arab diplomat; Ben Beley, his older Moorish friend; and a cristiano named Nuno Núñez. Their satirical content varies between cautiously mild and affably deadly.) The well-equipped petimetre, writes Cadalso, must pretend to sophistication but despise real knowledge: he must “look upon a philosopher, a poet, a mathematician, and an orator as a parrot, a monkey, a dwarf, and a clown.” He should disparage his country and ancestors, but listen humbly to the advice of French hairdressers, dancing masters, opera singers, and chefs. If married, he must go for months without paying attention to his wife, and entrust the raising of his sons to a hired teacher or, for that matter, to his coachmen, lackeys, and mule drivers, rather than bother with it himself. Though it is not necessary that he should actually converse in other languages, the petimetre should have fragments of them, little phrases or single words of French and, if possible, Italian too,
which he can sprinkle into his conversation and thus take on the air of a gallant: “Nel più vivo del cuore,” “rifiuto.” “Troppo mi sdegni perché troppo t’adóro,” “adorable,” “maîtresse,” “volupté,” and so forth. The point of this trifling was to impress not visiting Italians or Frenchmen but Spaniards (preferably women) who had never been outside the country.
When speaking pure Spanish, it ought not be simple. Especially in Madrid, a fantastically elaborate, euphuistic style was cultivated by petimetres and their near relatives in dandyism known as currutacos. The distinction between the two was not always clear, but on the whole the currutacos favored an even more baroque form of speech and were not afraid of being manifestly Spanish rather than faux-French. An etiquette book published in Madrid in 1796, the Libro de la moda, remarked of the currutaco that he was a sort of human butterfly, a farfallóne amoróso like Mozart’s Cherubino: “His delicate, ethereal, slender mechanism keeps running on nothing more than the help of juices, spirits, essences, conserves, bonbons, and liquors; he sips, tastes, drinks, samples, but never eats.… When he visits the Prado his passing is like a passage from Homer or Virgil. To achieve this effect, he has spent two hours at the mirror.” The fop had to astonish with his verbal excess. Ink was not mere ink: it was “the liquor of the warty oak” (being prepared from oak galls). Paper was “shining crushed linen.” A pen was an aquilífero pincel, an “eagle-bearing brush.”
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