IN THE MEANTIME, Spain was politically stranded. A monarchy without its monarch, patriot Spain had no unifying government and desperately needed to form one. It had to construct a new state from the ground up while fighting off Napoleon. Somehow it had to bring into play all those reserves of discipline and self-determination that had been brushed aside by the absolutist antiguo régimen. At first, each region of Spain cobbled together its own cortes, or government. But these needed to be merged in a collective affirmation of national unity. This could not happen in Madrid, which José I controlled. So the fledgling parliament—the national Cortes, with three hundred deputies—met in Cádiz. This was the one city in Spain, other than Barcelona, where a liberal, bourgeois majority could be counted on. Its only aristocracy was commercial: practical, hardheaded, and fairly tolerant men, open to northern European ideas and, though by no means anti-monarchist, opposed to royal absolutism. With the Cádiz Cortes, the Spanish middle class, led by intellectuals, stepped firmly into political life.
The new constitution this Cortes approved was by far the most radical and democratic set of decrees yet ratified by a Spanish government. Its framers (fourteen of them, including five liberal clerics) went to some lengths to dissociate their work from the existing French Constitution of 1791: they were at war with France and did not want it said that they were basing their laws on hers. Hence their somewhat implausible claims that their constitution was really a recovery of ancient Spanish fueros (rights) that had existed long before. So it accepted kingship but abolished what it called la funesta política del absolutismo, “the baneful policies of absolutism.” In future, Spain would be governed by an elected assembly that would meet every year, and whose resolutions no constitutional king could cancel. It set in place most of the freedoms that democratic states take for granted today but that had not existed in Spain before: those of assembly, choice of occupation, speech, and the press. It also guaranteed the equality of all Spanish people throughout the empire, so that (for instance) a Cuban or Venezuelan had just the same rights as a citizen of Sevilla or Madrid; canceled all forms of privilege arising from military, aristocratic, and Church authority; curtailed the monastic orders, so disproportionately powerful in Catholic Spain; and abolished such hated institutions as torture and the Inquisition. The menu of reforms seemed endless, and to conservative interests extremely threatening.
In sum, the 1812 Constitution held out a radiant promise of hope to Spanish intellectuals and ilustrados, of whom Goya was one. His enthusiasm for it is clear from several drawings and a large painting that he made around that time. In one drawing in Album C, Lux ex tenebris (1812–14), he went some way to conflate the political event with a Biblical one. Its title, with one minor change, comes from a passage in the New Testament (John 1:5, Vulgate) referring to the arrival of Christ and his teachings in an uncomprehending world: “Et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt”—“And the light shone in darkness, and the darkness did not understand it.”
We see a young woman flying angelically in midair. A starburst of light emanates from her face and shines from the little book she cradles reverently in both hands. Too small to be a Bible or a breviary, it is presumably the printed Constitution of 1812. Below her are the forces of human retrogression, who indeed do not understand the message of the tiny duodecimo book: a dark soup of ink in which figures of monks and priests can just be made out. These are the clergy who had mobilized against the passage of the constitutional parliament, the enemies of freedom. On the next page of Album C, Sol de justicia, the theme is restated without the flying woman: this time, an evenly hung balance, archetype of justice, hangs in the air miraculously unsupported, an apparition (it seems) from heaven, shedding light on an amazed crowd of spectators. On the left, the beneficiaries of justice renewed clasp their hands in prayer and joy, and a young woman in the foreground capers with delight. On the right, the enemies of justice recoil; a priest (with his dark silhouette turned against us, a threatening blob of shadow whose biretta resembles a black cat’s ears) slinks off, while monks and nuns gape and glare with apprehension. This is, literally, the struggle between light and darkness, la luz y las tinieblas, that some Spanish writers saw in the opposition between the “Liberals” who longed for the 1812 Constitution and the “Serviles,” or reactionaries, mainly clerics, who saw the Constitution’s threat to their own interests as even worse than Napoleon’s.
Goya, Inquisition Album, Lux et tenebris, c. 1812–14. India ink wash and sepia, 20.5 × 14.2 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 8.2)
Goya, Inquisition Album, Sol de justicia, c. 1820. India ink wash and sepia, 20.5 × 14.2 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 8.3)
The largest work of art Goya dedicated to the emergence of Spanish liberty from the 1812 Constitution is now in Stockholm, not Madrid. It is the enormous canvas he produced in the last years of the Peninsular War, the Allegory of the Constitution of 1812 (1812–14). It is, in a sense, a sister painting to his Allegory of Madrid (this page), except that it contains no approving references to José I. It has three figures in it. At the center is a handsome young woman in a simple white dress who may be an embodiment either of liberty or of the Spanish nation. She is radiant from the light that streams in from the upper left corner. In her right hand, stretched out, is a small book, again the printed form of the 1812 Constitution. Her left hand holds a slender wand or scepter, emblematic of noncoercive power, and her wrist is firmly held by an old, bearded man with enormous white wings outspread, enveloping her in a blaze of protective radiance and drawing her gently away from the darkness, which the little book is dispelling. He is Time, a fact made plain by the hourglass in his left hand, just as the sand in the upper glass indicates that the glass has just been turned and that a new era full of possibility is beginning. Old Man Time is drawing Spain (or Liberty) away from the darkness of the past. In a small oil sketch for this painting, the darkness swarms with the familiar creatures of Goya’s nightmares, bats and owls, like the ones pestering the dreamer in El sueño de la razón; but Goya eliminated these from the final version. In the foreground is another young woman, all but naked, writing with a quill pen on a sheaf of paper, her feet reposing on an open book on the ground. Clearly, she is History: her feet steadied on the archival past, her writings illuminated by the light that streams from Liberty’s side of the picture. She is naked, or nearly so, because plain, unveiled Truth is the business of History. The whole concept of Goya’s picture is permeated with ideals of plainness suited to the French Enlightenment and perhaps the American Revolution: the bare, emblematic figures, the simple and unembroidered white dress whose bodice has slipped a little, not for the sake of sexual titillation, but to reveal the nipples, and hence the nourishing beauty, of Liberty.8
Goya, Allegory of the Constitution of 1812, 1812–14. Oil on canvas, 294 × 244 cm. National-museum, Stockholm. (illustration credit 8.4)
THE MOST ELOQUENT TESTIMONY to Goya’s feelings about war is spelled out at length in the Desastres. Almost from the moment that the Bourbon dynasty sold out to Napoleon in Bayonne he was overcome with what he would call, in the frontispiece to the cycle of war etchings that preceded and followed his two May paintings, “Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer”—“Sad forebodings of what is going to happen.” These etchings are known, for brevity’s sake, as the Desastres de la guerra (Disasters of War). Their full collective title was much longer: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte. Y otros caprichos enfáticos—“Fatal consequences of the bloody war against Bonaparte in Spain. And other emphatic caprices.” Goya lived continuously in Spain through the whole course of the Peninsular War (1808–14). He was over sixty when it started—much too old for a war correspondent, and too deaf to hear a gunshot. And yet it is not too much to claim that his Desastres created a form of their own: that of vivid, camera-can’t-lie pictorial journalism long before the invention of the camera, of
art devoted to reportage, claiming its power as propaganda from its immediacy as an act of witnessing. Never mind that not everything, or even not much, that is depicted in them happened in front of Goya’s eyes. He was the artist who invented a kind of illusion in the service of truth: the illusion of being there when dreadful things happen. Goya made this explicit in the captions to his plates. Yo lo vi, “I saw it,” he inscribed under plate 44 (this page) in which refugees from a country village are fleeing from the advance, unseen by us, of the French soldiers; but one can’t help wondering if he did see that fiercely satirical conjuncture of the mother urging her terrified child to follow her and not look back, and the village priest on the left clutching the possession most dear to him, a bulging money bag, in the same way—since Goya never failed to squeeze more juice from a good motif—that the pathetic priest in Capricho 30 clutches his twin bags of money that are also a pair of giant testicles. Y esto también, “And this as well,” is the caption to the next plate, 45, which depicts three exhausted women plodding away from the unseen threat that shadows them, bowed under the weight of infants and household possessions, the sense of their effort to just keep going reinforced by the lowering darkness of the sky above and before them, with one solitary farm animal, a young pig, scampering in front. That Goya singled these out as things he had seen is also a tacit admission that some, probably many, of the events in the Desastres were things he had not seen but only heard about from others, or put together as epitomes from less coherent impressions of his own. Which is only to be expected: if he had been present at some of those incidents, he could not have escaped with his life.
Very few of the eighty plates are dated, and none were published in Goya’s lifetime. So chronology is little help in picking out any specific events to which the Desastres refer. However, very broadly, the images fall into three groups. Forty-six plates, 2 through 47, describe incidents of guerrilla war, the Spanish pueblo against Napoleon’s soldiers. Eighteen more, 48 through 65, are concerned with the effects of the great famine that devastated the people of Madrid between 1811 and 1812—a famine that Goya, living in the city, experienced too, and whose effects he saw at first hand. And then there are the Caprichos enfáticos, or “emphatic caprices”—a run of fifteen allegorical and satirical images, editorial cartoons rather than journalistic reportage, that attack what one might call the disasters of peace—evoking the shattered hopes of Spanish liberals and ilustrados in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat after Fernando VII returned to the throne, abolished the 1812 Constitution, and set in train an iron policy of repression, censorship, inquisitorial tyranny, and royal absolutism.
Finally, there is the very first plate of the Desastres, the title page of the series. Tristes presentimientos is not an image of war. It shows a single emaciated man kneeling on the bare earth, dressed in prophetic rags, his breast bared, his arms extended in surrender and supplication. His face, eyes rolled to the sky, bears an expression of strain and inconsolable despair. Behind him, everything is roiled darkness, and what there is of landscape is reduced to a few dimly perceptible bare rocks. He is alone in the universe, and he has been granted, as Goya’s title puts it, “Sad forebodings of what is going to happen.” There will be no relief, no lightening, either for him or for us. He is Job on the dunghill of Spain; he is also taken from the familiar pose of Christ in his agony in the olive grove of Gethsemane, kneeling to beseech God the Father to let the cup of sacrifice pass from his lips and spare him the torments of crucifixion—a pose familiar to every Spaniard who had seen the familiar effigies of the Passion narrative in his or her church. Like the rebel in the white shirt facing the French muskets in the Third of May, he is the Spanish people battered but not broken, face-to-face with a disastrous and heroic future that will be revealed in the plates to come.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 44, Yo lo vi (“I saw it”), 1810–20. Etching and aquatint, 16 × 24 cm. (illustration credit 8.5)
Goya, Los desastres, plate 45, Y esto también (“And this as well”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 15 × 22 cm. (illustration credit 8.6)
Goya, Los desastres, plate 1, Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer (“Sad forebodings of what had to happen”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 17.7 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.7)
DID ANY SINGLE EVENT set off Goya’s decision to create this series? He was living in Madrid in May 1808, and although the stories that he actually witnessed the firing were pious inventions, he almost certainly saw some of the aftermath of the night’s executions at the hill of Príncipe Pío—the outbursts of semi-random violence directed by madrileños on the street against French soldiers in the city, with poor and improvised weapons, pistols, axes, pikes. This could account for some of the incidents shown in the Desastres, such as plate 3, Lo mismo (“The same”), in which a frenzied Spaniard, his mouth agape and his eyes distended and glaring from his bony face, has raised a heavy-bladed axe to deliver the death blow to a French soldier struggling on the ground while a second patriot, seen from behind and straddling a second soldier, who is on his hands and knees, is on the point of stabbing his own victim with a knife. In Madrid, or in the countryside, or in a village? One cannot know. Goya’s etching clearly reveals how he liked to explore, reuse, and recycle poses, sometimes for rather different ends. The man with the axe in Lo mismo is the very same man who, this time seen from the back, forms such a towering symbol of proletarian strength in Goya’s painting The Forge (this page); even his dress is identical except for the short waistcoat. Only the weapons and targets differ: the smith’s hammer about to fall on a red-hot iron billet, the patriot’s axe about to chop into the soldier.
It is also possible that the “trigger” of the Desastres was a visit he made to the city of Zaragoza a few months after the war began, in the first week of October 1808. Goya had been brought up in Zaragoza. His father worked there. He did his first big commissions for its churches. Zaragoza’s heroic resistance to Napoleon’s army became one of the legends of the Peninsular War; on a much smaller scale, it was not unlike the prodigious and nationally inspiring fight the Russian army waged against Hitler’s forces at Stalingrad.
Zaragoza was first besieged in the summer of 1808 by a French force under General Baron Verdier. Its citizens forced the French to fight their way into the city literally house by house; every collapsed roof became a barricade, every cellar a bunker or a redoubt, every pile of rubble a sniper’s post. One of the Desastres plates, number 30, Estragos de la guerra (“Ruins of war”), depicts an appalling fragmentation, a jumbling of bodies and furniture, that seems like a prophecy of the effects of aerial bombardment or high-explosive shelling on a gutted house.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 3, Lo mismo (“The same”), 1810–20. Etching and aquatint, 17.7 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.8)
Thanks to the able generalship of the Spanish commander, Captain-General José de Palafox y Melci, the French assault failed—but only narrowly. In the lull that followed the first French siege, Palafox, a military genius but, equally, a man of invincible egotism, invited Goya to come and view the shattered remains of Zaragoza as testimony to the suffering and determination of its citizens. In a letter, Goya declared that, even though the trip meant that he could not attend the dedication of a portrait of Fernando VII he had been commissioned to do, he could not refuse Palafox’s offer: it was his patriotic duty to record the evidence of the resistance.9 That he did go seems quite sure. He also did drawings and perhaps some oil sketches there: the diary of Lady Holland mentions that, in a wrecked house in Zaragoza once occupied by General Palafox, several studies by Goya had been found, slashed and mutilated by the sabers of the victorious French.
One great portrait emerged from that visit: his 1814 likeness of General Palafox on horseback. Goya was an able but by no means an exceptional horse painter: though the mounts on which he placed Carlos IV and his queen are certainly impressive animals, he was not as good with those beasts as Velázquez or Stubbs. In fact, he tended to avoid do
ing horses, and there are very few of them (and those, only in the background) just where you might expect to see them in quantity, among the plates of the Desastres. But the ghostly white, black-shaded, pinheaded nag that plunges across the canvas of the Palafox portrait has immense energy, and suggests that one of the devilish, rawboned mounts of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse has been drafted into the military. Palafox himself, with his fiercely macho glare and luxuriant muttonchop whiskers, bestrides it a little awkwardly; we feel that the urgency with which his drawn saber is egging us on to the burning town on the horizon could be deflated if the animal jinked. But, as so often with Goya, one is filled with admiration at his compositional skills. The white part of the horse’s body forms a rough arc, tied together (as it were) at the top by the crimson loop and knot of Palafox’s sash. Only on reflection does one notice that this major arc is echoed by a minor one above: the white fur trim of Palafox’s hat, which is similarly and deliberately united by the red cockade. These, plus his cuffs and the fire of Zaragoza burning on the horizon, are the only touches of bright color in the picture. The effect is wholly deliberate and yet, at first, hardly noticeable.
Goya, Equestrian Portrait of General Palafox, 1814. Oil on canvas, 248 × 224 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 8.9)
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