Goya, Asalto de la diligencia (Attack on a Coach), 1793. Oil on tinplate, 50 × 32 cm. Private collection. (illustration credit 4.30)
The Attack on a Coach (1793) is a considerably grimmer replay of the subject Goya had painted earlier for the Osunas. The springtime greens, the lushness that gave that much larger panel its decorative quality, have gone, and in their place is a near-monochromatic palette of raw umbers, gray, and ocher with a high, pale, cold blue sky. The coach has been waylaid somewhere far out in rocky country, and none of its passengers is going to get a chance. Three are already dead on the ground—and a very Goyaesque touch is given by the orphan shoe of the man in yellow britches and red coat in the foreground, lying a short way from his foot, emphasizing his death. As in the Osuna picture, one robber is stabbing a man to death on the ground. The last survivor is kneeling to beg for his life, but another robber has leveled his gun and is about to shoot him.
The most powerful of the small paintings in this group, however, and the ones with most to say about Goya’s state of mind in the wake of his illness, are Interior of a Prison and Yard with Lunatics (this page), both 1793–94. We know where the madhouse scene, the Yard with Lunatics, actually was: a hospital in Zaragoza. The place where Interior of a Prison is set is not certain; perhaps there was such a prison in Zaragoza, perhaps not. One suspects it was a composite, an architectural fantasy invented by Goya partly out of his memories of Piranesi’s prisons. The architecture is huge, rudimentary, and oppressive, its dominating form a big shadow arch—the wall it penetrates must be six feet thick or more. A foggy, cold light filters through this opening, not from the world outside but from some further recess. Seven figures, all men, are chained to ringbolts, fettered, handcuffed, in various postures of misery and dejection such as men assume when time has stopped, when there is no reason to suppose that the next hour will be any different from the last. There is an almost fantastic disproportion between the thickness and weight of the iron that holds them down and the frailty of their bodies: it makes you think of the title page of Piranesi’s Carceri, with its giant figure loaded with more heavy metal than (you would think) a body could bear. The theme of the painting is leaden immobility—leaden in color, but also in the immense and meaningless weight of time creeping by. There is little reason to doubt that this vision of immurement, in a place whose walls are too thick for outside sound to penetrate and the only voices are the fitful utterances of prisoners, served Goya as a metaphor for his deafness.
Any trauma makes you think of worse trauma: it sets the mind worrying and fantasizing about what else might be in store, and whether you can bear it if it comes. Much of the pain is in the slow waiting. What Goya had been through in his sudden illness was not a fantasy, but it was a mystery. Neither he nor any of the doctors he might have consulted could possibly have diagnosed what was wrong with him, because such diagnosis was not within the reach of the medical knowledge of his time. (If it had been, we might have more chance of naming his affliction ourselves.) To fall badly ill, sustain grievous injury, yet not be able to name what the trouble is, know whether it is temporary or permanent, or, if the former, make any guesses about how long it will last, whether it will ruin your career and your normal social relations or eventually sheathe its claws and let you alone—all that is an experience that verges on desperation. But for Goya there was something else, something worse: deafness means isolation. It still does today, with all the therapeutic means that are at the disposal of the deaf and enable them to communicate, with some degree of fluency, with others. But in the late eighteenth century the isolation was even deeper. It plunged a man into the silent prison of the self. There was lipreading, for which one might or might not have a talent. There was sign language, crude but reasonably effective, at least for signaling basic needs as they arose. Goya understood it, for there exists a drawing he made of hand signs for the deaf and dumb. But beyond that, there was no way by which a man of Goya’s psychic complexity and subtlety could readily extract the meanings of the world of sound and speech through the terrible block of deafness. “Lost! Lost! Lost are my Emanations!” is the tragic cry of William Blake’s Tharmas as he feels the world closing in on him, the onset of an impotence worse than sexual. An artist lives to communicate and to be communicated with, and for such a person to be immured in the prison of the self is torture. Blindness, undoubtedly, is the worst, especially for a visual artist. But fear and loathing of deafness is so general a human trait that torturers and jailers have always done their best to simulate it in creating punishment: the “dumb cell,” where no sound penetrates, where no man can orientate himself socially through the sound of another’s voice and the meaning of his words, is one of the traditional horrors of the carceral world.
Goya, Interior de cárcel (Interior of a Prison), 1793–94. Oil on canvas, 42.9 cm x 31.7 cm. The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle. (illustration credit 4.31)
Goya, Corral de locos (Yard with Lunatics), 1794. Oil on tin-plated iron, 43.8 × 32.7 cm. Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. (illustration credit 4.32)
The late eighteenth century was the heyday of the prison as isolator; not for some time to come would the idea of the prison as a reformatory institution begin to occupy the minds of European governments, trickling in from the ideas of Jeremy Bentham to emerge, in the minds of English and American reformers in early Victorian days, as the organized and (it was supposed) benignly structured penitentiary. Bury them and lock down the lid: such had been the prevalent idea before. And as bad as prisons traditionally were, madhouses were even worse, because practically no one had any idea of how to treat the mad, let alone any desire to penetrate the causes of their suffering. Madness was a given, an absolute; it lay beyond the reformer’s reach. Madhouses, therefore, were simply holes in the social surface, small dumps into which the psychotic could be thrown without the smallest attempt to discover, classify, or treat the nature of their illness. This was a charter for degradation, and what made it worse was the habit, not restricted to England but ingrained throughout Europe, of using the helpless inmates as a form of entertainment: one could visit them in the asylum as one might visit the apes in the zoo, and be amused by their capering, babbling, and strange antics, which to those of a philosophical bent illustrated John Dryden’s thought that “Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” Just as, to post-Darwinians, the monkey in the cage gave rise to thoughts about one’s ancestry, so the shit-bedaubed lunatic crouched in a corner of the cell, gabbling opaquely like one of Swift’s Yahoos, reminded the visitor of his own good fortune in being normal. Atrocious though it was in England, the institutional degradation of the mad was given even wider license in Catholic countries like Spain because of their traditional belief in diabolic possession as the cause of madness. To scourge or otherwise mistreat the mad was not arbitrary cruelty; it was a means (distasteful perhaps, but necessary) of doing God’s work. In any case, the idea of “patients’ rights” was not yet born: just about any cruelty could be defended as exorcism.
So it perhaps appeared to the authorities who ran the provincial madhouse at Zaragoza. Anyone fears madness who has felt the wind of its passage; and one may presume that, after his disorienting and frightening illness in Andalucía, Goya was particularly worried by the thought of what could happen to him if he did, indeed, go mad. Moreover, confinement—harsh isolation without appeal for reprieve—is a powerful trope for deep deafness, a condition for which there are no strong visual metaphors. (It is not hard to come up with visual signs for blindness or sexual impotence; but for deafness?) We do not know why he paid a visit to the Zaragoza madhouse. There is some evidence to suggest that an aunt and an uncle of Goya’s, both called Lucientes, were confined there between 1762 and 1766.29 But there is no doubt that he went there, for on January 7, 1794, he wrote to Bernardo de Iriarte, his friend at the Royal Academy in Madrid, to say that he was at work on a new scene representing a corral de locos, “a court
yard with lunatics, in which two naked men fight with their warden, who beats them and others with sacks (a scene I saw at first hand in Zaragoza).” The “sacks” would have been the simple tunics worn by inmates, easily washed and replaced. In the finished picture the two naked men are fighting with each other, not with their warden. The warden’s face expresses a despair as inconsolable as that of the miserable inmates. And there they all are, all in it together, each imprisoned by his neighbor, the miserable loonies of Zaragoza: fighting, struggling, snarling and glaring, crouched and crawling like animals on the gray stone. The light is depressing. The courtyard is open to the sky: gray sky, a silvery twilit gray, cold and dank—the two flanking figures on the left and the right, one hugging his arms around his chest and the other clutching his legs, seem to be shivering with cold. It is as though a fog is descending from the sky, chilling their bones. This pervasive dimness of Purgatory is of a piece with the light in Interior of a Prison, but somehow worse because even colder.
Some twenty years later, Goya would revisit this subject, but with significant differences. In The Madhouse (c. 1812–13), the lunatics are not exactly running the asylum, but they have constructed a world of delusory gestures of power in which they almost might be, and no keeper is lashing them into submission. One madman reclines on the flagstones, a toy crown on his head and his right hand raised in a parody of episcopal or papal blessing. Nobody takes notice of him. Another, wearing feathers in his hair, holds out his hand to be kissed by the shadowy mob of courtiers behind him. A third, cards on his head, croons to himself, holding a flute or perhaps a scepter. A naked man, standing with his back to us with a tricorne hat perched on his head, is absorbed in aiming an imaginary gun at someone unseen. Another, clad only in a wisp of drapery, is doing something with the horns of a bull: perhaps remembering corrida games of his boyhood. Finally—and almost incredibly daringly for the day—there is a pair of naked men having what can only be sex in the blurred shadows to the right: just as Goya, in The Naked Maja, painted what are certainly the first curls of female pubic hair in Western art, so in this madhouse he made the first depiction of fellatio.
Goya, Manicomio o Casa de locos (The Madhouse), c. 1812–13. Oil on panel, 45 × 72 cm. Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.33)
IS THERE ANY THREAD that links the earlier cabinet pictures of the 1790s together, despite their different subjects? There would seem to be. Nigel Glendinning was surely right when he wrote that it was Goya’s depression.30 He had just been stricken down into the depressive’s nightmare predicament: cut off from the world and from intimate contact with others by a severe, undiagnosable, and incurable illness; alienated; lost within himself; desperately anxious (as his letters to Iriarte imply) to show that things were not as bad as they seemed, that nothing was deeply wrong, that he could still function as a man and an artist. The bullfight was one superb metaphor for this. In most of the images, one sees the fighters winning over the bull, rising above its strength and dark animal nature. Organized human consciousness prevails, as in the spectacular reverse pass of Pepe Illo. They are not “happy” pictures; the brisk and heraldic colors of the arena have drained out of them. The color schemes of other cabinet paintings are not merely lacking in ebullience: they are positively funereal—the monotone of scrubby ochers and sepias in the attack on the coach, the gloomy hues of the shipwreck. Fire at Night refers to a melodramatic but unidentified moment: we see a congested mass of figures escaping from a conflagration, though no building is in view; nevertheless, the fact that several of the figures are being carried horizontally, some on sheets as though just dragged from their beds, suggests that the fire is in a hospital or lazar house and that those being rescued are patients unable to walk or otherwise fend for themselves. This would fit well, again, with Goya’s own sense of helplessness in the face of his disease.
Almost as unhappy, though less catastrophic in its tone, is the one picture that should, at least, look jolly and is the closest in subject to the tapestry designs Goya had fled from producing: The Strolling Players (1793–94). Here are the familiar creatures of the commedia dell’arte, Pierrot the juggling harlequin, the dancing dwarf, pretty Columbine, on their improvised stage in front of a tent that serves them as a green room; there is the crowd, drinking it all in, with a river far off behind them—but where is the sense of enjoyment? ALEG. MEN, short for “alegoría Menandrea,” is written on a scroll that hangs over the edge of the stage; this identifies the performance as a Menandrean allegory, Menander having been a Greek dramatist who specialized in short, moralizing comedies that could, at a stretch, be seen as the ancestors of Spanish sainetes. But the colors are dull, the atmosphere depressing, the movements somehow mechanical; the scene has none of the unaffected brio of Goya’s tapestry cartoons. Thus, with the scenes of prison and madhouse, he reaches a nadir of lamentation for lost happiness that can be nothing if not autobiographical: the prisoners laden with thick, exaggerated chains are Goya’s versions of Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles.”
But Goya’s deepest and most violent fears are registered in the goring of the picador. There, human skill breaks down into chaos. The man cannot be saved. The horn is in his groin. He is doomed and castrated, all at once. The artist must have seen such catastrophic events more than once: they were not uncommon in the bullring. Yet one cannot doubt that the goring of the picador had an emblematic power for him. It is a terrible image of Goya’s own fear of impotence—in a more general sense, of his fear of being no longer able to impose himself upon the world, brought to the surface in an acute form in his deafness.
WITCHES AND ANGELS
CARLOS III DIED in December 1788; Spain, as was customary, went briefly into mourning, and then into formal rejoicing the next month when, on January 17, 1789, the prince of Asturias assumed the throne of Spain as Carlos IV, with María Luisa of Parma as his queen and consort. Their reign, which would last nearly two decades, would bring Goya to his peak of material and social success—while being struck down with a crippling but still unidentified illness that would immeasurably deepen his art—and plunge Spain into a maelstrom of confusion, misery, and suffering such as it had never known before.
Neither Carlos IV nor his queen seems to have had any intellectual or esthetic effect on the man who was to be their court painter. Goya’s relationship with them was not one of those reciprocal and fruitful affairs that sometimes, if rarely, occur in patronage. But they liked him, paid him, genuinely appreciated his work, and had enough taste to realize that whatever works by other artists they might add to the colossal royal collections built by the Hapsburg monarchs of Spain and then expanded further by Carlos’s own Bourbon predecessors, Goya was clearly the best living painter in Spain.
Carlos IV has gone down in history as a political embarrassment, a royal nebbish: the ins and outs of international politics at the turn of the nineteenth century were mainly beyond him. However, one can hardly blame a not-too-bright absolute monarch for a certain clumsiness in managing his role just at the time of the French Revolution, which deposed and beheaded his own cousin Louis XVI. He was neither smart nor tough enough to save his own throne from Napoleon, and he committed one of the greatest acts of self-impoverishment in history by turning over the then-Spanish colony of Louisiana to France—only to see Napoleon sell it in 1803 to the fledgling United States of America for the unbelievably trivial sum of $15 million, cash on the barrelhead. Since this doubled the size of the United States in one deal and opened the way to doubling it again, it is hard to admire poor Carlos’s foresight.
This much, however, can be said for him: he was not, in any clinical sense, an idiot. That unhappy distinction belonged to his elder brother Felipe, who would normally have succeeded to the throne but was so feebleminded that his father had no choice but to disinherit him. He died in 1759, leaving Carlos as the future king.
In his ineffectual way Carlos did care about the well-being of his people. But his r
eign was also an example of the sort of gamble hereditary kingship is and must be, because it brings no guarantees of skill, energy, or intelligence. He had little acumen, but he was born to run the whole of Spain—and at a time when, five years into his reign, the very principle of kingship and its survival was flung into doubt. Immured in the palace and its rituals, Carlos hardly knew the Spain he ruled. Of Europe he knew nothing: he had to wait for the throne for two thirds of his life, frittering it away harmlessly until his father died in 1788.
Goya Page 17
