For anyone who has had to endure a full shareholders’ meeting of a large modern corporation, its mood is instantly recognizable. No figure gets real precedence over any other; the king is at the center of the table on the dais, but he and his flanking officials are pushed into the background, and the only emphasis he gets is a small heightening of color in his costume—plus his location at the vanishing point of the perspective. The most prominent single zone in the painting is a rectangle of sunlit, inlaid floor. It is a crowded composition that speaks, paradoxically, of emptiness and solitude; an image of droning discussion that conveys only a sense of silence; a theatrical presentation—for this vast room resembles a stage on which all action has stopped and nothing happens, with light streaming in from the wings on the right, a light that seems almost unearthly in contrast to the gloom of the chamber. Yet the obvious antecedent of this morbid space, with its large orthogonal divisions of ceiling and floor, lies right at the heart of Spanish painting in the “Golden Century,” in the work of the artist whom Goya admired to the point of filial piety: the big, brown, receding chamber in which Velázquez set the figures of Las meninas.
So Junta of the Philippines looks both backward and forward. Backward because of its enormous size, its sense of monumental occasion, and its clear invocation of Velázquez. But forward, too, because of what one could fairly call its incipient modernity: its bareness, staginess, and deliberate cultivation of mystery in the middle of what, by rights, should have been a straightforward narrative of an official event. One hesitates to invoke the word “Surrealist,” and yet there is something about the whole tone of the painting that suggests if not Surrealism iself, then certainly the aching distances and enigmatic half-events of its precursor, the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico.
Goya, Junta de Filipinas (Junta of the Philippines), c. 1815. Oil on canvas, 327 × 417 cm. Musée Goya, Castres. (illustration credit 9.16)
In one of the high wall niches on the left, behind the rows of company directors, one sees an isolated figure, whom the king cannot see and who is clearly detached from the other men in the hall. Who is this mysterious and unique standing watcher? Scholars have determined that he is Miguel de Lardizábal, born in Mexico in 1744, who in 1760 emigrated to Spain and became completely absorbed in the study of Spain’s problems of imperial economics.11 Because of his hostility to Fernando’s běte noire, Godoy, he became a partisan of Fernando’s—neither a happy position nor a secure one, since the Desired One was both paranoid and fickle, and in due course his suspicions of disloyalty fell on Lardizábal. In September 1815 Lardizábal, who had actually commissioned Junta of the Philippines—he was its president by then, as well as minister for the Indies—was dumped by Fernando and imprisoned at Pamplona. Hence, he could not be included at the royal table in the painting. But Goya could not bring himself to leave Lardizábal out of the composition, and so (as a sneaky rebuke to the king) he included the president of the junta in the niche, visible to us but not from Fernando’s eyeline.
In the closing years of the war Goya also painted a number of decorative and genre canvases that had nothing to do with the conflict. Presumably he wanted relief from its terrible themes; and he must also have wanted to do pictures that were fairly easy to sell, now that official patronage had all but dried up.
Hence the satirical paintings of hags, and the alluring ones of prostitutes at a window, dated between 1808 and 1814. Time, alternatively known as Las viejas (“The Old Girls”) is the most acrid of these. A pair of crones are examining, if not exactly admiring, themselves in a hand mirror. On its back is the sardonic inscription ¿Qué tal? (“How’s things?”). No good, it seems. The old bat on the right, a chapfallen dame in a beautifully light-struck muslin robe of pale blue and yellow, fiddles with what appears to be a powder compact; in her dyed-blond hair is a jeweled arrow, of the kind that Queen María Luisa was wearing in The Family of Carlos IV. (This similarity gave rise to the idea that she is Goya’s horrid caricature of María Luisa herself, but there seems to be no real basis for that. Diamanté arrows were a common kind of hairpin.) Artifacts last; their owners decay. Her companion is a horror, a death’s head, her nose eaten away by the pox, her hands like claws, her lips and eyes raddled with caked incrustations of lipstick and kohl, her teeth discolored. Rising behind them, also peering at their reflected images, is the ultimate victor of this colloquy: Father Time, with his shag of gray hair and extended wings, grasping not a scythe but a broom with which he will sweep the crones away like the dust they so nearly are.
The Young Ones (c. 1812–14) is of course the antitype of this withered pair, an image of brief beauty: a pretty lady and her maid in front of a frieze of ordinary working women, laundresses scrubbing their sheets and hanging them up to dry on cords and poles that define the horizon line. Instead of admiring her image in a mirror, the pretty one is reading, with evident satisfaction, a letter that can only be from a lover or admirer—a flattering “reflection,” which her maid has evidently just brought her. To strengthen the point, her dog, a King Charles spaniel, is up on its hind legs, devotedly and insistently pawing at her skirt. Her maid raises her parasol to keep the sun from darkening her mistress’s rosy complexion, for in Goya’s time ideal female beauty did not include a tan: tans were a sign of proletarian work, and would remain associated with labor rather than leisure until well into the twentieth century.
Goya, Time or The Old Ones, 1808–12. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille. (illustration credit 9.17)
Goya, The Letter or The Young Ones. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille. (illustration credit 9.18)
Nothing indicates whether this girl is a prostitute or not. However, Goya’s pictures of women on balconies leave no doubt about this. The image of the ventanera, or woman looking from a window, had one chief meaning in eighteenth-century Spain: a girl soliciting street trade from above, alone or accompanied by her celestina, or bawd. The type was fixed for later use in the seventeenth century, by Murillo in Two Women at a Window (c. 1655–60): one of the women veiling her face in mock modesty, the other looking at her target, you, the spectator, with a broad and inviting grin. Goya brought this to a further point, almost of parody, in Maja and Celestina on the Balcony (c. 1808–10). The blond maja is suggestively disheveled, with plenty of cleavage showing. Behind her lurks the ancient celestina, a veritable monster of hypocrisy, fingering her massive rosary beads as she grins in complicity and points at the girl. It is not the subtlest of images, but subtlety—except for the pictorial subtlety of his delectable treatment of the girl’s white-and-gold costume—was not Goya’s intention here.
Goya, Maja y Celestina en el balcón (Maja and Celestina on the Balcony), 1808–10. Oil on canvas. Collection of Bartholomé March, Madrid. (illustration credit 9.19)
AS SOON as the Peninsular War ended, Goya embarked on another large, private project. Instead of the huge effort of the Disasters, he began work on a shorter series of prints, the Tauromaquia, his homage to the great popular ritual uniquely associated with Spain, bullfighting.
There are several possible reasons that he did so. To begin with, he had always been an aficionado, an enthusiast for the rite; and like many other intelligent and perceptive Spaniards, he saw in the corrida a particularly intense metaphor of human fate: the struggle between human consciousness (the torero) and the raw power of nature, as epitomized in the bull. He claimed, probably truthfully, that he had fought bulls in his youth, and that with a sword in his hand he feared nothing and nobody. According to his friends, he went so far as to compare painting to bullfighting—a trope that, after Hemingway’s writings popularized bullfighting among Americans in the twentieth century, was to become an irritating feature of the rhetoric of modernist “risk” culture, but was not a cliché in Goya’s time—and he had no doubt that the lidiador (bullfighter) was practicing a real and valuable art: an idea that had found painted form some years earlier in his celebrated self-portrait of 1794–95, wearing a torero’s embroidered jacket while working a
t the easel. And finally, it may be that despite the tense and frightening content of some of his bullfight plates, Goya just wanted to relax and even to make a bit of money from images of such a popular spectacle. The effort of doing the Desastres was immensely grueling and draining. It could not have been otherwise. But with the Tauromaquia Goya could refresh himself and remember the glorious acts he had witnessed—the fatal errors and unyielding courage of the bullfighters, the stubborn ferocity of the beasts, the archetypal contests between life and death, sun and shadow—played out in arenas whose form went back to (and sometimes directly preserved) the circular ring architecture of Spain’s ancient Roman past. Today, of course, there are many people who regard Goya’s bullfight etchings as not much more than nostalgic evocations of a bloody and disgusting form of entertainment that should be abolished. It is their right to think so. In fact, there was no shortage of liberal, enlightened Spaniards who agreed with them two centuries ago. But it is also true that to understand this artist, you must understand the Tauromaquia.
Perhaps the most salient thing about Goya’s bullfight etchings is how little they resemble modern bullfighting. This is partly on purpose, of course, since he meant to give some sense of the origins of the rite before going on to describe what were then (but no longer are) its modern forms. But to scrutinize these images is to become aware of how much bullfighting has changed in the last two hundred years. The subject was one to which Goya returned frequently over the long course of his life. One of his very last paintings—done in July 1824, shortly before death wrote finis to his exile from Spain, at the Hôtel Favart in Paris during a visit from his place of exile in Bordeaux—was Suerte de varas. The title is a slang-technical term that refers to the opening moves of a bullfight, when the animal is attacked by picadors and their horses are progressively weakened by the wounds inflicted by the furious bull in defending itself. It is a remorselessly bloodthirsty and objectively cruel painting. On the left is a picador on his horse, surrounded by a crowd of chulos, or “assistants,” if that is not too clinical a term for the mob in the ring. On the right, superbly profiled, the one clean form in the painting and yet clearly fragile in its isolation, is the bull, still standing erect but with the bright slash of a red wound in its neck. The group on the left is a congested mess of squat humans and dead or dying animals, roughly painted, heavily shadowed in black: you can feel the brutish force in the picador’s body as he leans forward, the spear scrunched under his armpit, trying but failing to get his horse to run a few steps at the bull. The horse, for which Goya expresses no sympathy at all, is in terrible shape. The horns of the bull have half-disemboweled it. Blood streams from its anus. A brightly horrible loop of red intestine hangs down from its belly and drags on the ground. It waits passively, in shock, for death. “It is in truth a piteous sight,” wrote Richard Ford,
to see the poor mangled horses treading out their entrails, and yet gallantly carrying off their riders unhurt. But as in the pagan sacrifices, the quivering intestines, trembling with life, formed the most propitious omens—to what will not early habit familiarize?—so the Spaniards are no more affected with the reality than the Italians are with the abstract tanti palpiti of Rossini.
Horses in the corrida were wholly expendable: old nags without quality, bought cheap from knackers; their death struggles were mere jokes and evoked only hoots and jeers from the packed crowd. The main object, according to Ford, was to keep the wretched animal on its feet long enough to save money:
If the wound received by the horse be not instantaneously mortal, the blood-vomiting hole is plugged up with tow, and the fountain of life stopped for a few minutes. If the flank is only partially ruptured, the protruding bowels are pushed back … and the rent is sewn up with a needle and pack-thread. Thus existence is prolonged for new tortures, and a few dollars are saved to the contractor; but neither death nor lacerations excite the least pity, nay, the bloodier and more fatal the spectacle the more brilliant it is pronounced. It is of no use to remonstrate.
Goya, Suerte de varas, 1824. Oil on canvas, 50 × 61 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (illustration credit 9.20)
Much of what seemed entirely normal to Goya, and addictively entertaining to his fellow aficionados, would strike a modern connoisseur of tauromachy as gross, comic, and overdone, closer to circus acts than to the restrained, highly stylized, and therefore noble behavior of the torero and the matador in the ring. Probably this was because, by the early nineteenth century, bullfighting itself had turned into a much more popular ritual in Spain. Its origins, as public spectacle, had been chivalrous: a matter of knightly or otherwise noble figures engaging in combat with wild animals, spearing them from horseback. Its development traced a sort of arc, from the primitive to the “noble” to the populist.
Some of the first plates in Goya’s Tauromaquia seem meant as illustrations to a text by the Francophile writer Nicolás Fernández de Moratín (1737–80), an acquaintance of Goya’s, and the father of one of the painter’s better friends, the poet and playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín (whose portrait the artist had done in 1799). Years before, in 1777, Moratín père had written a booklet called Carta histórica sobre el origen y progresos de las fiestas de toro en España (Historical Outline of the Origin and Development of Bullfighting in Spain). Moratín related how in 1527 the emperor Charles V had celebrated the birth of his son Felipe II by fighting and killing a bull while on horseback in the arena at Valladolid. Goya depicted this in plate 10 of the series: the bull and the emperor’s horse are locked together in a solid mass on the left by the rigid diagonal of the spear, while on the right the light-colored reins and the pale curve of the bull’s crupper form the other slide of a triangle whose vertex is Charles V’s head. This is yet another example of Goya’s singular ability to stabilize scenes of violent action by making them into a framework of almost Neoclassical rigidity. As for costume, he paid no attention to it; the rider representing the emperor is wearing a peculiar pastiche of a cavalry hat, all plumes and froufrou, which is much the same as the headgear sported in plate 11, by Spain’s greatest national hero, the legendary warrior El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, c. 1043–99). Though these two historical personages lived some five centuries apart, Goya was not a whit concerned with their dress. Undoubtedly, the remoter origins of the corrida were more religious yet, indeed sacramental—the sacrifice of those dark and dangerous beings to the chthonic deities of the earth. If bullfighting had been nothing more than a sport or a public diversion, it could not possibly have gripped the Iberian imagination for so long. The Spanish Bourbons, however, were not as tolerant of bullfighting as the Hapsburgs. They thought it degrading, as did the ilustrados, like Jovellanos and Moratín, who served them. In 1785 Carlos III prohibited bullfights unless their proceeds went to charity; in 1805 his son Carlos IV forbade all corridas, charitable or not. This did nothing to damp public enthusiasm for the rite, and only caused the general public to dislike the ilustrados who opposed it.
Goya, La tauromaquia, plate 10, Carlos V lanceando un toro en la plaza Valladolid (“Charles V wounding a bull in the Valladolid Plaza”), 1816. Etching and aquatint, 25.4 × 35.6 cm. (illustration credit 9.21)
Goya was careful to show the brutal origins of bullfighting, no doubt because he considered them the authentic root of an immemorial ritual. The tone is set in the first plate, Módo con que los antiguos españoles cazaban los toros a caballo en el campo, “The way in which ancient Spaniards hunted bulls on horseback in the countryside.” The “ancient Spaniards” are very primitive indeed, Visigothic peasants (one might think) with their bound leggings and unhemmed skin garments; the landscape around them has the cold, bony, inhospitable look of that in some of the paintings from the Quinta del Sordo. Their role is to look “prehistoric,” and they do—as they also do in plate 2, “Another way of hunting, on foot.” Here, the horse is gone, and the struggle is between two hairy, ragged primitives and a bull that, transfixed lung and neck by their spearpoints, is begi
nning to sink into its death. The sense of desolation—the bull’s, not the hunters’—is increased by the staging: a flat, bare plain whose horizon line is broken only by a distant clump of trees, a suitably minimal stage set (one feels) for a scene from Lear or perhaps Godot. It is also the typical staging for some of the Black Paintings, and of course for the Disasters of War. Goya loved the grand bareness of Spanish landscape, and the way the black bulls stood out in it. Had he lived to see them, he would surely have delighted in the advertisements for Osborne Veterano brandy that have become the most beautiful and powerful outdoor sculptures in Spain: those flat iron bull silhouettes, taller than a house, that gaze with no eyes aloofly down on the cars scurrying beneath them on the highway.
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