THE FALL OF THE BOURBONS
THE Caprichos were meant to be popular art. That they did not succeed as such, that they did not find the wide public Goya hoped to reach, hardly matters now. And there is plenty of other evidence of Goya’s growing desire, in the late 1790s, to use popular, sensational subjects in his painting. You could hardly call him a pop artist before his time, but it’s certainly true that, just as he adapted the sensibility of the sainetes to his early tapestry cartoons, so he used events with plenty of journalistic “grip” in his later work: murders, kidnappings, rapes, intrigues, adulteries, deceptions, cannibalism—he even painted a sort of narrative comic strip about the doings of a notorious robber named Pedro Pinero, alias El Maragato, and his capture and defeat at the hands of an intrepid friar named Pedro de Zaldivia. Nobody could say Goya was “above” the pleasures of a hot tabloid news story. HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR was the kind of headline he would have appreciated. What may have seemed vulgar in his time (although there is no record of any connoisseur’s protesting this as a sin against the Holy Ghost of taste, some may privately have thought so) now looks prophetic.
Some of these small drawings and paintings from the late 1790s were closely connected to the Caprichos, on which he was working at the time. Most were collected by the same person, a Mallorcan businessman named Don Juan de Salas, and passed to his son-in-law, the third marquis de la Romana, to whose descendants they still belong. Of the original eleven paintings, three are lost; their subject matter is unknown. The eight survivors are mostly about one kind of horror or another—a guignol of the social underside of Carlos IV’s Spain, but without political content.
One of the first of them concerned a wife who had conspired with her younger lover to murder her wealthy husband, and was tried, imprisoned, and finally executed for it—always a good yarn. The victim was a rich Madrid businessman, Francisco de Castillo; the peccant wife, thirty-two-year-old María Vicenta Mendieta; the lover, her twenty-four-year-old cousin Santiago San Juan.1 The first image Goya extracted from this fatal triangle was Capricho 32, Por que fue sensible (“Because she was impressionable”) (this page), the despairing woman in prison, who is identified in early commentaries on the Caprichos as “the wife of Castillo.” Then Goya seems to have turned to the official (and unofficial) reports of the evidence given at the trial. (He probably did not attend, but he hardly needed to: his friend Jovellanos was justice minister at the time, and another ilustrado friend, Juan Meléndez Valdés, was crown prosecutor, so Goya could have had easy access to the court papers.)
San Juan, María’s lover and the murderer, gained admission to the house at about 7:15 on the evening of December 9, coming in from the dark street cloaked and masked. The victim had gone to bed early, suffering from a painful gumboil, and his wife had given him an opiate, probably laudanum, to make him sleepy. San Juan then swiftly entered the bedroom and gave Castillo eleven stab wounds in the chest and stomach, five of them mortal. In Goya’s painting of the murder, The Friar’s Visit (c. 1808–12) we see, in the background, the dim form of a man lying in bed, and the small glow of a fire. In the fore-ground is the ominous figure of a friar in his brown habit, standing just inside the street doorway with another friar just behind him, below the steps. The standing friar is the disguised lover, and María Mendieta sits on a chair before him, gazing up at his (to us) invisible face with an expression of submissive rapture, gesturing toward her prostrate husband in the room beyond. The stillness of this faceless friar is utterly menacing; one is reminded, once more, of Goya’s love of popular theater, its tableaux and climactic moments. Goya was so pleased with the effect that he transposed it into another of his Caprichos, plate 3, Que viene el coco (“Here comes the bogeyman”): a mother gazing up with the same adoration at the hooded figure of her secret lover, whose portentous appearance in the room has scared the wits out of her child.
During the same period, from 1796 to 1800, Goya also did a number of paintings and prints that revisit an old interest of his: lawlessness and banditry. These were not fancies, but real and pressing worries for anyone who traveled the roads of Spain. Perhaps Goya’s depictions were inspired by some particularly brutal incidents of highway violence, but there were so many of them that it is anyone’s guess whether his scenes were meant as reports or whether they are, so to speak, generic reflections on the awful fate that travelers risked. One thing is quite certain: though the common people of Spain were sometimes known to make folk heroes of their highwaymen and footpads, they were nowhere near as inclined to do so as the English, with their cults of Ben Turpin and other “likely lads” who paid for their robberies by “riding the three-legged mare” or the “horse foaled by an acorn” (the gallows) at Tyburn. Sometimes Goya depicted his footpads, smugglers, and highway bandits with a grudging or ironic realism, but he never lost sight of how bad and dangerous they were apt to be. Examples of this among his drawings include some from the Madrid Album (1796–97). A trio of rough-looking contrabandistas (tobacco smugglers) sit around a low fire under a tree, rolling their cigarettes and cutting their quids, their pistols and carbine ready to hand. “Good folk, we’re the moralists here,” runs the caption in Goya’s hand, a rebuke to facile disapproval of their trade. A nasty customer in black hat and leather leggings and holding a short blunderbuss stares from the page, poised like a dancer, ready to swivel his aim in a quarter of a second. “The lawyer,” Goya wrote above him, and added, “This one doesn’t let anybody off, but he’s not as harmful as a bad doctor.” These drawings can be taken as (relatively) lighthearted observations. Not so the paintings of bandits at work, which are chilling in their remorseless cruelty. They open with a dark, indistinctly menacing scene: in a remote mountain landscape, a coach has been bailed up and emptied of its passengers; one of them, blind-folded, waits with bowed head for one of his captors to blow his brains out; a woman with upthrown arms begs in vain for mercy. This is bad enough, but the next two are unbearable, probably as cold and awful in their depiction of conscienceless violence as high art has ever been.
Goya, La visita del fraile o El crimen de Castillo I (The Friar’s Visit or The Castillo Affair I), 1808–12. Oil on canvas, 41.1 × 31.8 cm. Colección Marqueses de la Romana, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.1)
Goya, Madrid Album, 89, El abogado: Éste a nadie perdona, pero no es tan dañino como un médico malo (“The lawyer: This one doesn’t let anybody off, but he’s not as harmful as a bad doctor”), 1796–97. Brush and India ink. Private collection. (illustration credit 7.2)
The first of these shows the bandits at the mouth of a cave or below an over-hanging ledge of rock, to which they have taken their prisoners. The men have been separated from the women. One woman, raising her hands in the immemorial gesture of entreaty, is begging for their lives. No use: with firearms leveled, the bandits are about to cut the men down, and one of them, blindfolded, bows his head in resignation.
The action of the second painting has moved inside the cave mouth. One of the bandits is stripping a woman of her clothes: she is down to her white shift and will be quite naked in a moment. In the background, another bandit pauses in his molestation of a second woman (her hands are clasped, but it is not clear whether she is begging for mercy or they are simply tied) to look back at his accomplice.
Goya, Bandido desnudando a una mujer o Asalto de bandidos II (Bandit Stripping a Woman or The Bandits Attack II), 1808–12. Oil on canvas, 41.5 × 31.8 cm. Colección Marqueses de la Romana, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.3)
Why is this image so disturbing? Not merely because it depicts the prelude to rape. European artists had been doing that for centuries. It was a “normal” subject. Quite often the artist would depict the victim as gazing at you, the viewer, with an expression of distress, an appeal for help, enabling you to feel morally elevated above the violent deed, not complicit with the rapist. But here the relation between victim and viewer is different—shockingly so. The slim, beautiful, helpless woman hides her face: she is all body, re
duced to anonymity, a purely sexual object. And from whom is her face hidden? You. Whose gaze does she fear? Yours. She does not want you to see. She is stricken by shame at your gaze. The bandit unveils her, as a slave merchant bares his goods, for your eyes. It is a terrible accusation of the viewer’s complicity, achieved by the simplest imaginable means. “No se puede mirar,” Goya would inscribe beneath one of the group murders (also in a cave) in the Disasters of War. “One cannot look.”
But one must look. What is a picture for, if not to be looked at?
Goya, Bandido apuña-lando a una mujer o Asalto de bandidos III (Bandit Stabbing a Woman or The Bandits Attack III), 1808–12. Oil on canvas, 41.5 × 31.8 cm. Colección Marqueses de la Romana, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.4)
What Goya paints here is connected to one of the favorite themes of his history painting: bare, lovely Truth being unveiled by Time. (It’s hardly an accident that the bandit stripping the woman looks old and weathered, like a villainous version of Father Time himself, though without the usual beard: Tempus Edax, Time the Despoiler.) But here the act reveals no truth beyond the miserable omnipresence of brutality in this fallen world. The act of looking is also an indictment of the viewer, an act of self-shaming: rape by association. Here, sex and impending death are most intimately linked. One is reminded that the English word “autopsy,” meaning the analytical study of a newly dead cadaver, comes from the Greek root meaning “the act of seeing with one’s own eyes.” One also remembers how essentially Sadeian the picture is. Only the sadist finds eroticism in the powerlessness of his victim. To others, what is truly erotic is not the imposition of one person’s power on another, but its very opposite: the ecstatic agreement between two people in mutual desire.
In the third picture, the dreadful possibility becomes actual. The woman has been raped and is dying. Her murderer has dragged her to the cave mouth, her track indicated by a bright streak of her crimson blood on the ground. Feebly, she raises one leg in a last effort of resistance. It is useless. The bandit has her pinned down, her left arm twisted under her back. Straddling her as if to fuck her once more, he raises his dagger, about to drive it down into her soft and helpless flesh; there could be no more brutal and explicit parallel drawn between blade and penis, especially since her poor, violated O of a mouth could be agape in a scream or open to suck.
Goya, Caníbales contemplando restos humanos (Cannibals Beholding Human Remains), 1800–08. Oil on wood, 32.7 × 47.2 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts et de Archéologie, Besançon. (illustration credit 7.5)
Around 1808, Goya produced a still more hair-raising vision of appetite and crime: a pair of small paintings on wood panels depicting cannibals and their victims. It is to his credit as a painter that these utterly repulsive visions of excess do not—not quite—topple under their own weight into a sort of grim, unconscious humor, as the marquis de Sade’s recitations of buggery and anthropophagy in the domain of the mad ogre Minsky tend to do.
In the first painting the cannibals are preparing their victims to be cooked. On the left, a body has been stripped and gutted and one of the cannibals is rummaging in its stomach cavity. (The skin of the cannibals is darker than that of their victims, but not dark enough to identify them as Indians, still less as Africans.) Next to this scene, enacted at the mouth of a cave, another victim dangles from a rope while another cannibal is briskly engaged in peeling his skin off. It’s worth noting that even in the act of depicting these gruesome doings Goya has stayed with one of his typical compositions, whose formality slightly cools the horror: the figures form a right-angled triangle, static in the gloom.
The second painting, Cannibals Beholding Human Remains, is more Dionysiac: a campfire scene in the (indeterminate) wild. The main figure looks frenetic, straddled in triumph across a rock—his pose is the same as that of the warlock in Capricho 65, ¿Dónde va mama? (“Where is Mama going?”) (this page), whose legs are braced to support a ridiculous assembly of brujas and familiars. In his right hand he waves a severed hand, in his left a head.
Nobody had painted such scenes before, or not with the same peculiarly secular feeling. They have no more religious import than feeding time at the zoo. The only parallels in earlier art to these cannibals’ atrocities were, in classical sculpture, the flaying of the satyr Marsyas by the offended Apollo, who was bested by him in a music competition, and in Christian art, the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, who was skinned alive rather than abjure his faith in the Christian god. Each has its pertinence to religious myth, but Goya’s paintings have none at all. Moreover, they seem to have no documentary purpose, no reference to any known historical event. The idea that they depict the martyrdom of the Canadian Jesuits Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant by the Iroquois in 1649 is only a guess and has nothing to support it. Why should Goya have been interested in the sufferings, almost a century before he was born, of some French evangelists in Canada, a remote country that he had never been to and that was not a Spanish colony? More probably his cannibal pictures derive, though somewhat remotely and with much greater narrative intensity, from prints he may well have seen: the ferocious visual denunciations of American cannibalism done by Theodor de Bry as illustrations to the compilation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century explorer narratives that still, a hundred years later, played a role in forming European impressions of the New World. Because de Bry’s images of the appalling cruelty of Caribbeans and conquistadors were so unflattering to the Spanish, these texts were not popular in Spain—they were, in fact, one of the pillars of the leyenda negra of Hispanic atrocity in the New World, which was no legend—but this does not reduce the likelihood that Goya would have known them.
The victims in Goya’s two paintings are certainly European, as is evinced by the clothes lying on the cave floor of Cannibals Preparing Their Victims, c. 1800–8—a buckled pump, a flat black hat—but there is nothing to connect such garments to Jesuit costume, especially since the Jesuits did not wear shiny buckles or other sartorial grace notes. Indeed, it seems rather implausible that any European, missionary or not, would be wearing these delicate items of clothing if he were far enough out in the wild to run into real cannibals.
More likely, these small pictures are ahistorical. They reflect Goya’s more general, and indisputably morbid, interest in cannibalism as a metaphor of human extremity—of the brutishness (homo homini lupus, “man is a wolf to man”) and terminal cruelty of unchained appetite. This is the Goya who would paint on a wall of the Quinta del Sordo some years later his dreadful vision of Saturn ripping flesh from his own son’s body; the same man who included scenes of cannibalism in the Caprichos and their related drawings, and who etched fragments of dismembered bodies impaled on trees in the Desastres. The purpose of the bits of European clothing scattered on the ground is to draw the maximum contrast between man in a “state of nature” (the cannibals) and others in a “state of culture” (their victims); these clothes and shoes are the leavings of a savagery that, Goya implies, is indeed the natural state of mankind and has nothing to do with the milky fantasies of intrinsic goodness and liberal gentleness indulged in by the French Enlightenment. These are pessimistic, skeptical little paintings, and it hardly matters whether they were done before or after the outbreak of war against Napoleon: they could not have been done by a man who had not known about the earlier Terror in France. Which was closer to “nature,” Robespierre’s self-idealized cruelty or the mock-bucolic douceur of Marie-Antoinette as milkmaid? The former, Goya insists; always, inevitably, the former, because savagery is the true state of nature, whereas gentility, mercy, and a sense of justice toward others are, if not false masks or lies, then certainly the product of consideration: which is to say, artifice. In this respect—and this only—Goya is truly a man of the eighteenth century, the same century that saw the grotesquely prophetic emergence of the marquis de Sade. Without Sade, no cultural picture of the eighteenth century is complete, because for all his impotent railing, long-windedness, and absurdly radical boasting, he
was, in the end, its arch-critic of “authority.” But Goya had never read Sade; no translation of him existed in Spanish, and Goya had little French.
So much of Goya’s graphic work was influenced by popular art—storytelling and devotional prints—that it would be hard to say which of his images owed most to it. But certainly his set of six small paintings, c. 1806, of the capture of a fearsome bandit by an intrepid friar would stand high among them.2 The bandit in question was Pedro Pinero, nicknamed El Maragato. The Maragatos were a nomadic people of uncertain ethnic origin who tended to congregate—when they got together at all—near Astorga; they had a nationwide reputation as expert muleteers, and stuck together as closely as Gypsies or Jews. These “sedate, grave, dry, matter-of-fact, businesslike people” were proverbially honest and remarkable for their peculiar costume, with its broad-bottomed britches and huge slouch hats.3 They do not sound at all like El Maragato as depicted by Goya, and why this notorious bandit got their name is a mystery. In the paintings he is dressed like any other footpad. But he was immensely famous in his time—a sensationalist’s hero of the Spanish highways, celebrated in folk song and popular prints.
Nothing about his wild career was more renowned than its end, which Goya painted. In 1804 El Maragato had been consigned to hard labor in the arsenal at Cartagena, but after two years’ imprisonment he escaped and took to the roads, robbing and plundering. In June 1806 he appeared, heavily armed, at a house near Toledo and held up its (mostly male) occupants, locking them all together in a downstairs room. At which point, enter a friar named Pedro de Zaldivia with two saddlebags over his shoulder, knocking on the outer door and begging for alms for his convent. El Maragato, having ascertained that the priest was alone, hustled him at gunpoint into the room where the other captives were held. Soon afterward, the bandit decided to take the shoes from one of his prisoners to replace his own worn-out ones. This gave the priest his chance. He drew a pair of his own shoes from a saddlebag and offered them to El Maragato. But when the bandit, still holding his musket on Fray Pedro, reached for the shoes, the intrepid priest grabbed the muzzle and swung it away. In the scuffle Fray Pedro was able to twist and wrench the weapon from El Maragato’s grasp; and when the bandit shoved past the priest to grab another of his guns from the saddletree of his horse, the priest unhesitatingly clubbed him with the gun butt, then shot him in the backside with a full charge of buck and smaller pellets. Fray Pedro then grabbed some rope that was lying handy and trussed El Maragato’s arms behind his back, taking him prisoner. According to the popular account of this deed, Maragato—understandably stupefied by this display of unpriestly aggression—blurted out, “Ah, father! Who would have thought when I threatened you with the gun to make you enter the house, and you went in with your head and eyes down, that you would betray me like this?” To which the priest replied, “Alas, amigo, though I showed humility on the outside, on the inside I possessed all the anger of God.” The bandit was taken in irons to Madrid, tried, hanged, then drawn and quartered. The friar became a legend in his own right. Goya clearly enjoyed himself in painting this legend as a semi-religious event, a miracle of priestly valor—a religious comic strip, in fact, cousin to the cheap plain or colored prints of the lives of the saints that were sold for a few pennies under the name of alleluias. For such an enthusiastic hunter as Goya, the central motif of Friar Pedro shooting the flabbergasted bandit in the backside at point-blank range must have been quite irresistible—a comic prelude, one might even think, to the tragic grandeur of the executions of the Third of May.
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