Goya
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Goya’s Inquisition Scene (c. 1816), shows the procedure known as an autillo, the formal reading of charges against the accused before the Inquisitorial tribunal. This ceremony normally took place inside a hall or a church; it had replaced the larger and even more theatrical outdoor ritual of the auto-da-fé (act of faith), in which the same procedure was enacted in a plaza in front of a larger crowd and in the presence of instruments of terror: the irons, the stake, and the pyre. Goya’s small panel (it contains dozens of distinguishable figures in a space only about 18 × 29 inches) is a superb example of his ability to assemble a narrative in a close-packed but entirely coherent space, and it draws a poignant contrast between judges and victims by formal means. There are four accused heretics, each wearing the coroza of shame; the traces of pink pattern on each cone lend a tiny, sardonic note of party-hat frivolity to the grim scene, while the different directions in which the cones are wagging and pointing suggest the disarray and fear that dominate the minds of the prisoners as they sit, their hands clasped in dumb submission, listening to the reading of the charges. This recitation is done by the lector silhouetted against the pillar in the background, whose face is lit by a candle as he drones on over his charge book. Below him are rows of clerics, including two Dominicans—that much-feared order, the Domini canes, or “God’s hounds”—in their white habits. Right below them is a figure in black, with a black skullcap and a gold pectoral cross: the chief Inquisitor, who, from the gesture of his hand, seems to be making a point to the priest to the left of him. The figure of the chief magistrate, seated in the left foreground, rhymes with the abject prisoners on the right in one of those “doublings” at which Goya was so brilliant. The prisoners slump and fidget; they are fatigued, and scared. The magistrate, who gazes abstractedly over their heads, is not scared, but he is very bored. He has seen this melancholy drama many times before, and by now it is merely procedural for him. The lives of these heretics do not matter; in any case, they are dead already. The sambenito that each wears—the word comes from saco bendito, “blessed bag”: a brilliantly conceived ecclesiastical super-graphic, a kind of chasuble, painted or embroidered with the names of their heresies and the iconic red flames of their burning—proclaims that they are destined for the stake. There will be no reprieve. But the ritual must go on, the millstones of Jesus must grind to the end. Later, each man’s sambenito will be displayed, like the skin of an animal, on the wall of his parish church, declaring another victory over heresy.
Goya, Inquisition Scene, c. 1816. Oil on panel, 46 × 73 cm. Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. (illustration credit 9.6)
The Inquisition Scene was preceded by dozens of drawings of Inquisition victims. How many, we do not know, but it was clearly a large and urgent theme for Goya after Fernando VII reinstated the Holy Office, and his visual notes on it fill most of a sketchbook known as Album C and probably dating from about 1810–14. Their constant theme, amplified by their handwritten captions, is judicial abuse: the ludicrous and deadly disproportion between the punishments meted out to the unhappy transgressors and the trivial nature of their “spiritual” offenses. Sometimes these torments and injustices happen to people who might be Goya’s contemporaries; sometimes, to ones who are clearly not. An example of the latter is page 19 of Album C, depicting an aged Jew in skullcap and dark caftan, sitting with bowed head and downcast eyes on the floor of a dungeon. One heavy chain secures his arms behind his back; another runs through a ringbolt in the wall to an iron collar on his neck. “Zapata, tu gloria será eterna,” runs Goya’s inscription (“Zapata, your glory will be eternal”). Zapata is a common name in Spain, but this one is thought to have been a pioneering medical doctor of the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century, Diego Mateo Zapata, who founded one of the earliest Spanish scientific institutions (the Royal Medical Chemical Society of Sevilla) and served with distinction as physician to the courts of Carlos II and Felipe V.8 Out of jealousy, his rivals denounced him to the Inquisition in 1721, for he was the descendant of conversos, Jews who had embraced Christianity but were suspected of doing it for opportunistic reasons, not out of “true” faith. They claimed he was a “Judaizer,” who secretly practiced the Jewish faith. The Inquisition arrested Zapata and put him to the question, under torture. He spent some time in prison but was eventually released, thanks to the intercession of powerful friends (including Felipe himself and the dukes of Medinaceli). Goya’s drawing depicts him as an archetype of the suffering sage; but Zapata died in 1745, the year before Goya was born.
Goya, Inquisition Album, 109, Zapata, tu gloria será eterna (“Zapata, your glory will be eternal”), c. 1810–14. Brush with gray and brown wash, 20.5 × 14.4 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 9.7)
Ilustrado writers like Puigblanch and Ruiz de Padrón who attacked the Inquisition wrote as though its past abuses kept going on into the present. Goya used this rhetorical device as well, and after two centuries we cannot know what cruelties, if any, he had actually seen. Probably very few, perhaps none; no painter is under oath. The Inquisition’s practice of torturing and burning people in public had not survived into the nineteenth century. Here, his moral anger and passionate sympathy with the victims are what count. There are styles in denunciation.9 In any case, one could well argue that the past practices of the Inquisition were so horrible, there could be no justification for keeping it alive now that it was weak.
Some of the Inquisition drawings depict its tortures. Others take a broader and, so to speak, more philosophical view of its methods. The torture images are sometimes linked to noted historical persons who fell into the Inquisition’s hands. These include not only Zapata but older figures, notably Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who fell into the hands of the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for his famous adoption of Copernicus’s theory that the earth went around the sun, not vice versa. Goya’s drawing Por descubrir el mobimiento de la tierra (“For discovering the movement of the earth”; c. 1810–14) shows the sage as martyr, head bowed, arms outstretched and shackled between two blocks of stone, legs extended and ironed down before him. We now know that this belief in Galileo’s carceral torments is pure myth—the Church silenced him but did not torture him, he never bore chains, and he continued to work in his own house near Florence—but Goya did not know this, and probably would not have cared if he had: Galileo was a martyr of reason to bigotry, and his proper setting was a dungeon. This outstretched and faceless figure is, in effect, a Crucifixion.
Goya, Inquisition Album, 94, Por descubrir el mobimiento de la tierra (“For discovering the movement of the earth”), c. 1810–14. Brush with gray and brown-black wash, 20.6 × 14.4 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 9.8)
Goya, Inquisition Album, 98, ¿Por liberal? (“For being a liberal?”), c. 1810–14. Brush with gray and brown wash, 20.5 × 14.3 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 9.9)
Goya, Inquisition Album, 93, Por casarsecon quien quiso (“For marrying whom she wanted”) c. 1810–14. Brush with gray and brown wash, heightened with pen and brown ink, 20.5 × 14.4 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 9.10)
Other torture victims in Goya’s Album C drawings are nameless. On page 98 in the album a woman slumps against a wooden structure, maybe part of a scaffold. Her ankles are locked down by a wooden bar. Her arms are bound behind her back. An iron ring, connected to a chain, encircles her neck. Her dress is torn and crumpled, her hair disheveled, her expression drained, her mouth slack. The simple two-word caption reads “¿Por liberal?” (“For being a liberal?”). She has been through hell. What kind of hell, Goya does not say. Perhaps a glimpse of it is afforded by the piercingly dramatic dungeon scene on page 93, Por casarse con quien quiso (“For marrying whom she wanted”). In darkness, a woman has been tied to a rack, which holds her head-down. The only highlight in the gloom is her anguished, inverted face. Her tormentors, five in all, cluster about her. Their features cannot be ma
de out. It is a strong image of human consciousness beset by forces of chaos, secrecy, anonymity. The fact that not a single person is known to have been tortured by the Inquisition for exercising free marital choice in Goya’s time is (almost) beside the point.
Not everyone in the Inquisition drawings is being tortured. Some are merely humiliated, exposed, or otherwise mistreated without violence. One figure, wearing coroza and sambenito, is seen from the back, seated on a crude stool, while a shadowy prosecutor reads the charges: “P.r mober la lengua de otro modo” (“For wagging his tongue in a different way”). A woman, gagged and fettered, sits on another stool, another platform, enduring the execrations of another crowd: P.r q.e sabía hacer ratones (“Because she knew how to make mice”)—a not uncommon charge in witch hunts at the height of the Inquisition.
Not all Goya’s images of religion, and of supernatural events, from the postwar years are designed to horrify the viewer. He was capable of straightforwardly pious pictures, some of which were done for the Church itself. An example is his commission for the cathedral of Sevilla depicting the city’s patron saints, Justa and Rufina, with palms, the attributes of their martyrdom. Both women were potters—an appropriate métier for the patrons of a city whose economy depended so largely on the making, sale, and export of ceramics—hence the bowls and plates they are holding. The Roman authorities had put them in an enclosure with wild beasts, which, impressed by the women’s sanctity, refused to dismember them; hence the enchanting lion turned pussycat submissively licking the bare foot of Rufina. The supremacy of their faith is indicated by the marble Roman goddess, a pagan idol whose fragments lie shattered at Justa’s feet. In the background is the skyline of Sevilla, its river, and the tall shaft of the city’s main landmark, the Moorish giralda, or belltower.
It seems not to have been altogether easy to get Goya to make the right picture for the taste of the Sevilla church authorities. The commission had been set up by an old friend, Juan Ceán Bermúdez, who decades before had helped secure him the job of painting the directors of the Banco Nacional de San Carlos. To judge from a letter Ceán wrote in 1817 to a collector friend, it was not an altogether easy task. The independent-minded and crotchety old genius had to be firmly coached: the cathedral authorities were paying 28,000 reales for the painting, a very substantial fee, and they wanted to be quite sure that they got full iconographic and spiritual value for their money:
At the moment I am trying to instill in Goya the requisite decorum, humility and devotion, together with a suitably respectable subject, simple yet appropriate composition and religious ideas, for a large painting that the Chapter of Sevilla Cathedral has asked me to obtain for their church.…
The Chapter, although it left the details to me, wanted the painting to represent the act of martyrdom itself or some other historic occasion in the lives of these saints. But I decided that it would be more appropriate to depict the two saints on their own, full-length.…
The tender postures and virtuous expressions of the saints must move people to worship them and pray to them, since this is the proper object of such paintings.
You know Goya and will realize the efforts I have had to make to instill ideas into him which are so obviously against his grain. I gave him written instructions on how to paint the picture, and made him prepare three or four preliminary sketches. Now at last he is roughing out the full-size painting itself, and I trust it will turn out as I want.10
Evidently it did, because Goya needed the money and Ceán Bermúdez was in any case an old friend. What Goya’s actual feelings about the girl martyrs may have been is not known, and not possible to deduce from the painting.
Goya, Las Santas Justa y Rufina, 1817. Oil on canvas, 309 × 177 cm. Cathedral de Sevilla. (illustration credit 9.11)
Goya, La Ultima Comunión de San José de Calasanz (The Last Communion of St. Joseph Calasanz), 1819. Oil on canvas, 250 × 180 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 9.12)
That is not the case with another icon of sainthood he produced two years later. The Last Communion of St. Joseph Calasanz (1819), was commissioned by the Escolapian order for its principal church in Madrid. It commemorates the moment when the founder of that order, San José de Calasanz (1557–1648), some ninety years old and close to death, insisted on rising from his deathbed to take Holy Communion before an audience of his juniors and disciples. This is a wonderful study in the frailty of determined old age, with the priest bowing forward as he administers the sacrament to the pale, white-stubbled ancient, his skin of an almost parchmentlike transparency.
How could Goya bring such feeling to this portrayal of an obscure old saint? First, because although Calasanz (like Goya himself, an Aragonese) is a largely forgotten figure today, he was not then. He was, in fact, one of the heroes of Catholic education, an almost Franciscan benefactor who, though a nobleman by birth, had devoted his life to the cause of educating the children of the poor. At the outset, living in Rome, he had tried to persuade secular teachers to admit pauper children free of charge to their classes. This failed, as did Calasanz’s next effort, to persuade the Roman Senate to subsidize education for the poor. Finally he and a handful of followers began to set up their own Escuelas Pías, a noble and charitable enterprise that only got them in trouble with the Catholic clergy and the Inquisition. But they kept at it, and by the time of Calasanz’s death, his order was running twenty-seven “Pious Schools” in Italy, France, and Spain, including Madrid, where the church of San Antón Abad was their chief foundation.
Goya, Self-portrait, 1815. Oil on panel, 46 × 35 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 9.13)
The second reason that Goya took on this commission and carried it off with such evident care and intensity was, one may surmise, that he himself was feeling his age. He was well past seventy, and he was anxious to leave behind him a tribute to the fathers of the Escolapian order, who, so long ago in Zaragoza, had taken charge of his own education at its Pious School.
WE SEE GOYA through his own eyes at the end of the war, in a life-size head and shoulders on a panel painted in 1815. His head is cocked to one side, and the directness of his gaze suggests that he is seeing himself in the act of painting. There are no mannerisms, no signs of décor, no emblematic costume. His shirt collar is open. His forehead is like a cannonball of flesh and bone, lightly filmed, one senses, with the sweat of concentration. He is a man at work, not a court painter displaying his official position. You cannot imagine Velázquez, one of the most dedicated snobs that ever touched a brush, depicting himself in this way. And certainly it was not the way Goya depicted the Spanish nobility, let alone the king, in the seventieth year of his life.
The last royal portraits Goya would do were of Fernando VII, soon after his restoration to the throne in 1814. They are not documents of enthusiasm. In fact, his distaste for the king is almost palpable, but there is nothing in them that could be construed as an insult. Their halfhearted glorification meets the requirements of the job: to take this unmajestic lump of royalty and surround him with the necessary attributes that reflected the Spanish people’s deluded view of him as El Deseado, the Desired One. The portraits were not based on actual sittings. Fernando sat for Goya only once, back in 1808, before Napoleon’s invasion. To do these portraits, Goya must have dug out the sketches he did on that occasion and reused them.
The first portrait was commissioned by the city council of Santander, and its terms were very specific. The king must be painted full-length and full-face, in the uniform of a colonel of the guards, with the blue-and-white sash of the Order of Carlos III. At his feet would be a lion, and there must be broken chains between its paws, signifying the restitution of Spanish liberty. His hand must rest on an allegorical statue of Spain, on whose pedestal would repose a crown, a scepter, and a royal mantle. Goya punctiliously supplied all this in fifteen days, exactly on time, for 8,000 reales. The figure of Fernando is so woodenly done that you can almost hear Goya yawning as h
e paints, and the lion is a lumpish creature that more nearly resembles a stuffed bear. It is a poor and unsympathetic performance, and the second portrait is little better. Now Fernando is seen in a cavalry encampment, with horses behind him. Some kind of engagement is taking place in the background, but Goya leaves it prudently unspecified: which is just as well since, as far as is known, Fernando, though he may from time to time have scrambled onto a horse for purely ceremonial reasons, never fought the French either on horseback or on foot, and was as devoid of military experience as he was of basic martial skills.
Goya, Fernando VII, 1814. Oil on canvas, 208 × 126 cm. Museo de Bellas Artes, Santander. (illustration credit 9.14)
Vincente López, Fernando VII, 1808–11. Oil on canvas, 240 × 116 cm. Museo de l’Almodi de Xàtiva. (illustration credit 9.15)
Apart from these less-than-routine efforts, the end of the war marked the close of Goya’s official duties as a portraitist. The portraits of Fernando were not commissioned by the king but by city governments and agencies: the king himself greatly preferred the high finish and detail reliably supplied by his own court painter, Vicente López, whose 1808–11 portrait of the monarch exactly repeats the iconographic detail of Goya’s Santander portrait symbol for symbol (lion, scepter, crown, and so forth) but is, if anything, even more congealed and pictorially uninteresting.
Goya did, however, complete one other official painting. It was the largest picture he ever made—some eight feet by ten—and one of the stranger productions of his long career: the grandfather of all boardroom portraits, crowded with dozens of figures set in a gloomy interior. It was intended to commemorate the patronage extended to the Junta de la Real Companñía de Filipinas by Fernando VII, who made an unexpected visit to the general session of the company’s board that was held on March 30, 1815, attended by fifty-one members and shareholders. Nothing seems to have happened or been resolved at this session; it was merely ceremonial, and dull ceremony at that. Fernando stayed only an hour and a half. However, his appearance at the meeting was meant to affirm his belief in the world designs of Spain and the continuation of its empire. This faith was, needless to add, vain. It was a collective delusion of the royalist right, believed in only by Fernando and his camarilla of incompetent advisers. The Spanish economy had been completely ruined by the war, and though the Royal Company of the Philippines had once been intended as a powerful instrument of trade and control like the British East India Company, it was now so unprofitable and useless that it was hardly more than decorative. Thus Fernando’s appearance was a futile gesture of belief in a hollow empire; a little more than eighty years later, Spain would lose its Philippine empire when the cannon of Commodore Dewey sent its whole navy to the bottom of Manila Bay.