Goya

by Robert Hughes

  Goya, The Duchess of Alba. Oil on canvas, 210.2 × 149.3 cm. The Hispanic Society of America, New York. (illustration credit 5.12)

  The duchess of Alba was a vain beauty, with plenty to be vain about. She was as vain as the queen herself, María Luisa—who, in terms of physical beauty at least, had rather less to vaunt herself on. The index of their vanity was, of course, their mode of dress, which Goya recorded with insatiable attentiveness, curiosity, and pleasure. Detail for detail, no great tragic artist has ever been more absorbed, in his untragic moments, by the minutiae of fashion than Goya. He savored the materials, their lightness and density and transparency, the folds and crinkles, the highlights and the shot-silk undercolors in their shadows. He took immense delight in their erotic implications, and in the social language of clothes: what a French-style dress might tell you about its wearer; how a maja-style jacket, in its sweetly truculent Spanishness, might act as a mask, a declaration, an invitation. In an age when all portraitists had to be aware of such things, none was more alive to them—or took more pleasure in painting them—than Goya. And he would dress up for the pleasure of painting himself into a role, as in the self-portrait as bullfighter in his own studio.

  His obsession—it is hardly too strong a word—with fashion mirrored that of the society he was painting. Upper-class Spanish women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were extraordinarily clothes-conscious, even by the standards of London or Paris. So much so, indeed, that some serious observers felt that their competitive mania for the most expensive imported fabrics and laces posed a threat to the Spanish economy. Herman de Schubart, Danish ambassador to the Spanish court in the late 1790s, remarked on this with some asperity:

  The unbridled taste of Spanish women for crepe, lace, embroidery, and delicate stuffs made the country dependent on other nations more advanced in the manufacture of such articles.… Along with fabrics and cloths, Spain also consumed an enormous quantity of finished pieces.… All the clothing for both men and women came from abroad. Two powerful foreign companies … shared the monopoly of this trade.… Spain had even lost the advantage of assuring for itself the distribution of all those goods.9

  No sumptuary laws, it seemed, could be passed to correct this extreme imbalance—especially when the queen herself set such a bad example with her unbridled consumption of luxury articles de haute mode.

  Goya, Ferdinand Guillemardet, French Ambassador to Spain, 1798. Oil on canvas, 186 × 124 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. (illustration credit 5.13)

  There may have been a further reason for the deepening of Goya’s skills as a portraitist during the later 1790s. Deafness makes you more aware of gesture, physical expression, body language. You learn to “read” signs beyond words, to perceive the minute particulars of how faces and bodies reveal themselves. It was really in the 1790s that Goya achieved full mastery as a recorder of the human face, a mastery that was never to diminish. One sees this in two major portraits from 1798, one of a French diplomat, the other of a leading Spanish ilustrado who was Goya’s friend. The diplomat is the first foreigner known to have been painted by Goya—a sign of the limited compass of sitters and friends within which he had worked, and the slow spread of his reputation beyond the Pyrenees: he was fifty-two when he began it.

  Ferdinand Guillemardet arrived in Madrid in 1798 to take up his ambassadorial tasks. These cannot have been altogether easy, since this Burgundian country doctor had been appointed by the Convention, the most proactive of the French revolutionary assemblies, which had been elected to succeed the Assemblée Législative in September 1792 and was in turn replaced by the Directoire in October 1795. In its first session, the Convention had decreed the abolition of the monarchy, and in 1793 it sentenced Louis XVI to death. Like most of its members, Guillemardet was known, both in and now out of France, as an enthusiastic regicide. What thoughts may have passed through Goya’s head as he contemplated the handsome and mobile face of his young client, who had unhesitatingly voted to kill the Bourbon cousin of Goya’s own patron, are beyond guessing—except that it may have been Guillemardet who gave Goya permission to carry out the long job of printing his first great series of etchings, the Caprichos, in one of the attics of the French Embassy, housed in the Superunda Palace in Madrid, and the artist was accordingly grateful. In the event, Goya produced one of his finest official portraits. Its pose was certainly strained: Guillemardet comes across as a young man looking for a suitably authoritative disposition of his limbs and body, and finds it in semi-profile with his left hand on his crossed thigh (the palm turned a little self-consciously toward us) while his right hand grips the chairback. His suit is Hamlet-black, his buttons are gold, his table and chair are covered in gold cloth, but what makes the picture is the visually wonderful blossoming of red, white, and blue at his waist and on the table, formed by the cockades and dyed feathers on his hat and the colors of his sash and sword belt. Later, this portrait—of which Goya, perhaps a little diplomatically, remarked that he had “never done anything better”10—went back to Paris with Guillemardet in 1800 and, by gift of his sons, became the first Goya to enter the Louvre.

  Goya, Caspar de Jovellanos, 1797–98. Oil on canvas, 205 × 123 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 5.14)

  Also in 1798, Goya produced what has long been regarded as one of his half-dozen outstanding male portraits, and the quintessential image of a Spanish public intellectual: his likeness of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, politician, writer, and, in the apt phrase of Hugh Thomas, “A Spanish Tocqueville—but a liberal Tocqueville.”11 Edith Helman, the deepest student of the relationship between Goya and this remarkable man, sums up the externals of their relationship:

  How much could Jovellanos have contributed to Goya’s artistic development? This cannot, of course, be measured, but it seems plausible that he would have guided him and advised him as he did all his friends: Cean, Vargas Ponce, Meléndez, and the rest of the Salamanca school of poets. He felt a calling to lead, to guide, to advise, and he practiced a kind of literary tutelage with his friends from Salamanca, sending them subjects for plays and counseling them on matters they should address in their poetry.… He could have suggested some social subjects for Goya’s tapestry cartoons … and many years later some themes for his Caprichos.…He always recommended Goya for individual or official commissions.12

  When Goya painted this portrait, Jovellanos was forty-four, eight years younger than his artist friend. He was both statesman and writer, the sharpest social critic of his generation in Spain and its most accomplished prose stylist. He had a small but choice art collection that included an Immaculate Conception by Zurbarán, a self-portrait by Carreño, and a painting of the Virgin and Child by Murillo.13 He was a zealous reformer. He regarded England’s industrial development as an essential model for Spain’s future, and conducted a long correspondence on this issue with Lord Holland, the British ambassador in Madrid. He vividly contrasted Spain’s industrial future with its exploitive colonial past in one sentence: “Coal contains as many possibilities as gold and silver: the problem is the lack of capital, and that here we prefer ignorance to enlightenment.”14

  Taking his cue from Campomanes, Jovellanos worked for the suppression of the sistema gremial, the closed guild system into which manufacturing was divided, because he viewed it (correctly) as outdated and reactionary despite its pretensions to protect the rights of workers: the right approach to production of goods was through open competition, which would foster variety of products and invention of new means of production. The guild system had become as great an impediment to manufacturing in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Spain as the closed-shop union system did to twentieth-century Britain until it was broken by Margaret Thatcher.

  Jovellanos campaigned to have Spanish, the vernacular, replace Latin as the language of higher education. He learned both Italian and English, and corresponded fluently with friends abroad, intellectuals in Paris and such Englishmen as Lord Holland, the former
ambassador to Madrid, with whom he was on warm terms of friendship. Inspired by the writings of the eighteenth-century Italian liberal penologist Cesare Beccaria (Dei delitti e delle pene, 1764), he was greatly concerned with penal reform. In his role as playwright, which he also was, he wrote a comedy about crime and punishment, El delincuente honrado (1774). He fought for the abolition of judicial torture, and against the endless and sterile accumulation of land by the Church. Jovellanos’s arguments are an essential part of the background from which the radical legislation of Mendizabal, forcing the sale of Church property, would arise four decades later. Naturally, he had few friends among the clergy and aristocracy. Some took him for an anti-clerical, even an atheist; but he was neither. Jovellanos was a fairly devout man, Catholic in most respects; he even declared that his spiritual “brother” was Thomas à Kempis, author of The Imitation of Christ. But, as one might deduce from his fondness for a text that so advocated humility, he was irreconcilably set against the greed, privilege, and excessive temporal power of the Spanish Church. To call him a red-hot abolitionist in the French manner would be quite wrong, though, and this showed in his attitude toward the Holy Office, the powerful arm of the Spanish Inquisition. He worked to limit its powers, not get rid of it altogether, much as he, like other ilustrados, would have liked to—not because he had an affection for it, still less because he felt it was necessary to the governing of Spain, but simply because he saw the task as politically impossible: the Holy Office was too deeply rooted, and the Crown was not prepared to confront it head-on. He wanted to strip the Holy Office of its arbitrary power to ban books, but without bringing into question the right of authority to do so; thus the power of censorship ought to be shifted to the Consejo Real and the bishops when printed arguments about dogma were under consideration in order to “destroy one authority with another.” Jovellanos saw the Crown—specifically, the reign of Carlos III—not as an instrument of oppression, as the French did, but as a guarantor of liberties. In this he was much closer to English liberals, whose work he admired, than to French revolutionaries. In his Elogio, written to Carlos III, he praised the Bourbon king as the veritable fount of all enlightened impulses: he had guaranteed “the circulation of truth”; he had stimulated the spread of useful knowledge and “sown the seeds of light in the nation,” much of this being due to his wise and farsighted backing of the policies of Campomanes and, in particular, his support of the Economic Society of Friends of the Nation.

  There can be little doubt that Goya’s friendship with Jovellanos and his exposure (which was probably limited) to his work made the artist’s view of Spanish social foibles more acute. The vision of a Spain where the clerics are torpid and self-seeking, the nobility asinine, the Inquisition a tyranny of superstition, the institution of marriage a commercialized farce—this perception of the country was shared by both men, and it is likely that its impetus flowed from Jovellanos toward Goya rather than the other way. Goya returned the favors Jovellanos showed him as best he could: for Jovellanos’s Poesías, for instance, Goya recommended him for membership (1779) in the Spanish Academy.

  Jovellanos’s political career had ups and downs—more of the latter than the former. The conde de Campomanes promoted him to councilor of state; but in 1790, when his friend the economist and banker Francisco de Cabarrus was prosecuted and Campomanes refused to intervene, Jovellanos quit Madrid in protest and went into semi-retirement in his native Gijón, in Asturias, where he received a humiliatingly low post as an administrator of roads and mines. There, over the next few years, he wrote his most important work, many would say the most important politico-economic manifesto of the whole Spanish Enlightenment: Informe sobre la ley agraria (1795). It was a powerfully argued plea for the development of agricultural land—Spain’s chief industry then—as private property. Communal lands and Church ownership must be abolished; if one owned land, one must live on it. All restraints on domestic trade, such as the innumerable district customs levies and taxes, must go. Sales taxes must be reduced, public works increased. And much more.

  The Informe did not go straight into law, but it did rehabilitate Jovellanos’s political career, because Manuel Godoy—by then, as prime minister, the de facto ruler of Spain—was impressed by it. The wheel of fortune turned so fast that by July 1797, two years after the Informe was published, the Inquisition was officially told not to touch the book—and a few months later, Jovellanos was summoned back to Madrid as minister of religion and justice. This did not in the least damp his zeal for depriving the Church of its power over farmland, with the result that his time in power was short. The Inquisition, frustrated in its efforts to get rid of him, went to work on the queen. She believed the clerics and, in turn, went to work on Godoy. In August 1798 Jovellanos was once again dismissed, on Godoy’s orders. He went back to seclusion in Gijón, where Godoy, wanting to fully appease the dangerous clergy, had him arrested in 1801 and flung into prison in Majorca. He remained there for seven years, and was released only by the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1808. Jovellanos became one of the leaders of the Junta Central (Central Council) of the Spanish patriots, but he had taken ill in prison and died, long before Napoleon was expelled from Spain, in 1811.

  Goya painted his friend and mentor in the spring of 1798, in the very short period—a mere nine months—when Jovellanos was in high office for the second time. The portrait is a marvelous image of the troubled and pensive intellectual in power. Jovellanos is in the palace, or seems to be: the magnificence of the furniture and appointments that surround him show that he is not at home. He sits on a splendid gilt chair upholstered in gold-ocher velvet. It is, perhaps significantly, a gilt chair in the French taste, whose solidly carved luxury suggests that the man sitting in it is, indeed, an afrancesado. He is caught in the act of thought, leaning forward, head supported by his left hand, left arm resting on the table. The table is ornately carved with a pattern of gilded rams’ skulls and swags of foliage. On it stands a large statue of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, whose emblematic bird is the owl, symbol of melancholy. Minerva is watching over Jovellanos as he broods among his papers, holding a letter that bears Goya’s name. His posture, head on hand, is classically that of sadness and reflection, as in Dürer’s Melancholia, a print that Goya would certainly have known. He seems bowed, if not exactly intimidated, by the load of his work and the cares of his ministerial office. The mobile mouth, the sparkling eyes testify to a degree of intellectual vitality that no excess of responsibility can extinguish. This tired and worried man is also a “natural” one, as befits an ilustrado; like Ben Franklin at the now-abolished French court, he is seen not wearing a wig. The painting is free and almost easy; Goya’s handling of the planes, hollows, and convexities of Jovellanos’s pale lilac coat is particularly beautiful, contrasting in its relaxed energies of movement with the more static and columnar forms of the white-silk-sheathed legs.

  A year or so later, Goya decided to externalize his image of a wise and troubled man still further. He did this, not with another portrait recognizably of Jovellanos, but with an etching of a man in a similar but almost abandoned pose, a figure whose face is hidden from us, who has descended into a deeper melancholy, a sleep permeated by nightmares. This is, of course, the best-known image of his etching series the Caprichos. In its present form it is plate 43, with its immortal title written on the side of the sleeper’s desk, “Elsueño de la razón produce monstruos,” “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters” (this page). The “monsters” are bats and owls flying around the sleeper in his dream. The owl, here, is not an image of wisdom; it is the stereotype of mindless stupidity, which was how owls were seen in Spanish folklore in Goya’s time. The bats are creatures of night, and thus of ignorance—and possibly of bloodsucking evil as well, in their association with the devil. A sinister-looking cat glares directly at us over the small of the man’s back. That this dream-haunted sleeper is not Jovellanos but Goya himself is shown by the owl on the left that offers him an artist�
�s chalk in a holder—the better to draw incorrect and misleading images with. The assault of the forces of darkness (you can almost hear the sibilant discord of their flapping wings) is watched by an emblem of perceptive wisdom, the lynx at lower right. (We know it is a lynx, not merely a big cat, by the pointy, two-tone ears.) The lynx, it was believed, could see through the thickest darkness and immediately tell truth from error. It gave its name to, among other things, the club of Italian literary connoisseurs known as the Accademia dei Lincei. There is, one need hardly add, no exact parallel to this haunting and marvelously strong image in other art. It does, however, seem to have a distant source in an etching that Goya certainly knew, done by his predecessor as painter to the king, Giambattista Tiepolo: the title page to the Scherzi di fantasia (c. 1743–57) (this page). It shows a battered block of stone, perhaps an altar, in the forest wilderness, with a row of owls perched atop it; these are clearly not wise Minervan birds, but wild uncouth creatures, hooting and flapping, just like Goya’s. Their role in sylvan magic is stressed by emblems on the ground: a head of garlic (that traditional witch repellent) and an egg, symbol of fertility.