Goya

by Robert Hughes

  The rituals of the bullring have inspired a deadening mass of kitsch art—and kitsch writing, too, such as Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, so unreadable today. (Who would have thought Papa would end up sounding like such a lady? Perhaps only those who remembered what his style owed to an American lesbian, Gertrude Stein.) But it is hard to think of any other artist’s graphic work that combines such perceptions of animal grace and power with such wonder at the gratuitous stubbornness of human courage as Goya’s Tauromaquia. It has the peculiar grace that art about art can sometimes achieve; it has the fascinated reverence that Degas, decades later, would display in his drawings and paintings of the ballet; and it is probably the most deeply felt tribute to other artists (apart from Velázquez and Rembrandt) in all of Goya’s work. Much later, Picasso would do many bullfight drawings in partial homage to Goya, but they are mostly doodles, and none of them have the intensity, ferocity, or precision of the Aragonese master’s. It was as though Picasso felt compelled not to seem to be trying at full strength, in case his best efforts were seen to be so obviously weaker than Goya’s. Homage it may have been, but an evasive homage that skirted true comparison.

  EXILE IN FRANCE

  BEFORE HE LEFT MADRID and went into exile in France in 1824, Goya finished a set of twenty-two etchings later to be known as the Disparates. Like the Disasters of War, they were not published during his lifetime, and now we do not know what he meant to become of them. Were they to have been a public statement of irrationality and mystery? A private utterance? A statement that, though distributed to some notional public without notes or a gloss, would have served only to baffle his admirers, no matter how sophisticated they may have been? Would their glancing references to popular customs, superstitions, and carnival amusements have been much clearer to people then than now?

  We can’t know. A leading Goya authority, Janis Tomlinson, has even raised the possibility that he never meant to publish them at all.1 But this, given the quantity of the plates, their high state of finish, and the fact that none of them were lost, seems very unlikely. Why, especially at his age, with time running out, would Goya commit himself to a project whose result he did not mean to be seen?

  They have been variously called the Sueños (“Dreams”) and the Proverbios (“Proverbs”) as well as the Disparates (“Follies”). Dreams is too vague and Proverbs, the name under which they were posthumously published by the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid in 1864, simply inapplicable: no Spanish folk sayings that correspond to Goya’s disturbing and idiosyncratic images have been unearthed. Disparate was Goya’s own word for them. Some of the surviving proofs bear titles written in pencil in his hand: Disparate femenino (“Feminine folly”), Disparate ridículo (“Ridiculous folly”), and so on. The root of the word disparate is dispar, “unequal” or “unparalleled,” something outside common experience—which Goya’s images certainly are. They have a black wildness that appears in many of the Caprichos, but certainly not all of them. The pessimistic and arbitrary side of Goya’s imagination now moves wholly into the foreground, and there is no pretense of creating rational structures to mock human foolishness, no firm footing of sense from which to criticize nonsense—folly is the “natural,” normal human condition. At least in the Caprichos you know what abscesses Goya was lancing, but in the Disparates not even that is always clear.

  Some repeat older themes. Goya found expressive the image of male helplessness before tough, defiant, or exploitive women. The pelele, a stuffed manikin tossed in a blanket by a ring of girls, appears in his tapestry designs. He uses it again in Disparate femenino, but with a twist. Six women are tossing a couple of peleles in the air. The straw dolls are smaller and more helpless-looking than they were in the tapestry cartoons thirty years before. Not only that, but the blanket bears a painted or embroidered design of a donkey. Does this asno imply the “asinine” nature of the flopping little dandies, so easily fooled and manipulated by women?

  Again, Disparate matrimonial (“Matrimonial folly”), sometimes known as Disparate desordenado (“Disordered folly”), repeats the theme of Goya’s earlier Capricho, “Who will release us?”—that bound couple surmounted by a giant owl, which is, like other owls in Spanish folklore and in Goya’s art, an emblem of stupidity, not wisdom. The couple is turned into a monstrous Siamese twin: two people conjoined in implacable marital loathing as a single body, half male and half female, a parody of Plato’s famous account of the origin of the sexes. (Even their feet are doubled, each with two sets of toes facing opposite ways.) They are straining for mutual release, but none has come or ever will, and they are watched by a wailing throng of grotesques who probably represent society at large lamenting the failure of one of its binding institutions. Some have turned into animals. With their distorted faces and the sluggish rhythms of their drapery, they look very much like the crowd of initiate witches being harangued by the Great Goat in Goya’s mural of the Aquelarre for the Quinta del Sordo.

  The clearest rerun of an older motif in the series is Disparate alegre (“Happy folly”), a dark and sinister-looking revision of Goya’s youthful tapestry design A Dance of Majos by the Manzanares (1777). Forty years have elapsed since then; the idyllic scene of Goya’s youth has grown older, so have the people in it, and so, Goya does not hesitate to remind us, has he. What was once a group of graceful youths, treading out their ceremonious measures to remind us that elegance is not the monopoly of the upper crust, has turned into a capering ring of six oldies in majo costume: the women not in the bloom of youth, the men far past it. The men’s movements are herky-jerky and ridiculously overstressed in mimicking the gestures of the women. The central man in the trio is afflicted by either a giant hernia or an incompetent trouser cutter. What was once enjoyably graceful is now undignified, though the participants do not seem to realize it.

  Goya, Los disparates, plate 1, Disparate femenino (“Feminine folly”) 1816–23. Etching and aquatint, 24.7 × 35.9 cm. (illustration credit 10.1)

  Surely one is meant to see in this slightly grotesque and pathetic group the image of Goya talking about himself—guying the miseries of old age, including his own, but admitting that it has not subtracted from his desire for pleasure. We dance when young, we dance when old; but the essential thing is that we should dance, even when—like this great and indefatigable spirit—we are too deaf to hear the music and too stiff to move with the grace that belongs to youth. Even when we cannot hear one another, the dance remains. Anyone who interprets this rueful print as a satire on the fact of aging knows neither Goya nor old age.

  Some Disparates are simple fantasy—dreams, including one of the most common of mankind, the defeat of gravity through flight. Modo de volar is one: it shows a number of men gliding on constructed wings, membranes (presumably of silk or fine cotton) stretched over delicate batlike skeleton frames of wood. A rudimentary web of cords running from the fliers’ hands and feet to the control surfaces suggests that these may be flapping machines (ornithopters) or perhaps primitive hang gliders maneuvered by the warping of their wing surfaces, though Goya does not seem to have tried to think this through: as flying machines, these are merely emblematic, and their relationship to Leonardo da Vinci’s flight studies, which he could not have known about, is only coincidental. (It is true that the Royal Library in Madrid did contain some codices by Leonardo, brought to Spain in the sixteenth century, but it is unlikely that Goya would ever have seen them, and even if he had, none of the sheets they contain have anything to do with flight.)

  Goya, Los disparates, plate 7, Disparate matrimonial o Disparate desordenado (“Matrimonial fully or Disordered folly”), 1816–23. Etching and aquatint, 24.7 × 35.9 cm. (illustration credit 10.2)

  Some of the Disparates hold an element of religious satire. In plate 4, for example, a man, possibly a friar, holds up a life-size carved effigy of a saint, as though to conceal himself from and fend off an enormous, moronic, dancing figure that advances on him, clicking its castanets. This creature is
a carnival fool of the kind known, for its size, as a bobalicón. It does not seem to pose any threat to the holy sculpture or to the friar cowering behind it. In fact, given its half-witted grin and the castanets it wields, it would seem rather to be adoring or propitiating the image. Goya is showing us an imbecilic devotion to images, out of intelligent control: religious superstition turned into a disparate, a folly.

  Goya, Los disparates, plate, 12, Disparate alegre (“Happy folly”), 1816–23. Etching and aquatint, 24.6 × 35.8 cm. (illustration credit 10.3)

  Goya, Los disparates, plate 13, Modo de volar (“Flying method”), 1816–23. Etching and aquatint, 24.7 × 35.9 cm. (illustration credit 10.4)

  Goya, Los disparates, plate 4, Bobalicón (“Big fool”), 1816–23. Etching and aquatint, 24.7 × 35.9 cm. (illustration credit 10.5)

  Some of the Disparates have political significance, or is it just that they can be read that way with the exercise of a little ingenuity? One such is Disparate de bestia (“Animal folly”) which most unexpectedly features a giant, exotic beast of a kind that figures nowhere else in Goya’s work, not even in the Caprichos: an Indian elephant. It is being lured or cajoled by four men dressed in Oriental costume, in caftans and Moorish headgear. The historian Michael Roche argued that this is an allegory of right-wing politics under the reign of Fernando VII.2 Unlikely as this may seem at first glance, it is not without a certain logic. When Fernando returned to the throne, he was surrounded by conservative advisers, all competing to confirm his own autocratic opinions and thereby ingratiate themselves with the vengeful and reinstated king. These were known as the Persians because of their belief in despotism. Their 1814 letter to Fernando exhorting him to assume absolute power and erase the 1812 Constitution was familiarly called the Persian Manifesto. So perhaps these Orientals, who are bowing and scraping to the elephant, seeking to attach bells to it and showing it an important-looking document, are trying to convince it of the charms of absolute power—not that Fernando, then or earlier, had ever needed much convincing on that point.

  Goya, Los disparates, plate 21, Disparate de bestia (“Animal folly”), 1816–23. Etching and aquatint, 25 × 35 cm. (illustration credit 10.6)

  Elephants had no heraldic association with either the Bourbons as a dynasty or Fernando in particular, but there had been an elephant in the royal zoo in Aranjuez, the property of Carlos III; and though the beast died in 1777, well before Goya was likely to have seen it, he would certainly have heard of it. Perhaps the corpse had been skinned and the skin stuffed by a taxidermist, later serving as a model for Goya; that might help explain the baggy and pathetically wrinkled appearance of Goya’s elephant, which has none of the solid appearance of a live one. Its ears are disappointingly vestigial. In any case, what did elephants symbolize? Strength, mildness, sagacity—the flattering attributes of wise kingship. This elephant seems particularly mild because it has lost its only weapons, its tusks. Perhaps the constitutionalists, seeking to disarm the king and limit his powers, have taken them away—while the Persians would like to see them replaced: an impossible project, but an alluring one for a despot like Fernando. Roche thought the elephant is a symbol of the naïve Spanish people, gulled by the Persians, but it seems more likely that Goya meant it to represent the king himself. But for all one’s hopes of exegesis, there seems to be no skeleton key to the Disparates.

  THE GREAT SERIES of paintings Goya made for his own pleasure at about the same time is equally enigmatic, and likely to remain so. These were the Pinturas negras, the so-called Black Paintings with which, in his last Madrid years, Goya was covering the walls of his farmhouse on the other side of the Man-zanares outside the city, now converted into his studio and semi-solitary hermitage. Nothing, he felt, obliged him to be available to the court anymore; as for private clients, they could come to him. The new house, according to its title deed, was “beyond the Segovia bridge … on the site where the Hermitage of the Guardian Angel formerly stood.” It had twenty-two acres of arable land, and a vegetable garden. Comfortable but not palatial, and in need of some renovation, it was sturdily built of brick and adobe, with two stories divided into several rooms, two attics, a well by the garden, and another in the courtyard. Goya paid 60,000 reales for it, cash. By a peculiar coincidence, the property next door had been owned by a farmer who was deaf, and so was named the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man’s House. This name passed to Goya’s own property, since he was the only notable deaf man around.

  He moved in with a small ménage. His housekeeper was a woman named Leocadia Zorilla de Weiss, about whom not much is known but quite a lot has been assumed. She was a handsome woman of uncertain age, somewhere in her early thirties, and related to the wealthy Goicoechea family into which Javier, Goya’s son and heir, had married in July 1805. This made Doña Leocadia a very distant relative of Goya’s: the cousin of his daughter-in-law. She had married Isidro Weiss, a German Jewish jeweler working in Madrid, and borne him two sons. The marriage seems not to have been happy, for in September 1811 Weiss denounced her for “illicit conduct,” presumably adultery, and in October 1814 Leocadia gave birth to a daughter, not Weiss’s, who was christened Rosario. It has often been assumed that Goya was this child’s real father, and so he may have been, but there is no evidence for this except the kindly interest the old painter took in the child’s upbringing and welfare.

  Weiss himself was not doing well; in fact, he was nearly bankrupt by 1817. Leocadia prudently left him and attached herself to Goya as his “housekeeper,” for which read “mistress.” Reportedly, she was not only a handsome woman but a shrewish one as well, which cannot have greatly dismayed the old artist: he was too deaf to hear her tirades. His wife was long dead; she had died in 1812, leaving no offspring except her son Javier, the only child of their union who had grown to adulthood. There is nothing one can say about her, because neither Goya nor any of his friends saw fit to comment on her, and neither did Javier. One of millions of unrecorded Spanish wives, she was different from them only in having married a genius: not a curse, to be sure, but hardly an unmixed blessing.

  Javier was, one may presume, a disappointment to his father, but that did not stop Goya from loving him and doing his considerable best to support him. In 1803, for instance, Goya negotiated with the Crown to exchange the original copperplates of the Caprichos and 240 unsold sets of the prints for a lifetime annuity for his son. In 1806, after Javier married Gumersinda Goicoechea, Goya presented his substantial house at 7, calle de los Reyes in Madrid to the newly-weds so that they would always have a free home. His fondness was not strongly reciprocated. Javier Goya turned out to be a flop of a son, lazy and just short of a wastrel. He made no career for himself (Goya referred to him as a pintor, though that was a piece of wishful thinking, since Javier painted nothing), depending instead on regular support money from the Quinta del Sordo and living off inheritances and annuities—including one from the duchess of Alba, which did much to keep him going after her early death—together with the proceeds from selling works of art his father deeded to him. He died at the age of sixty-nine, having done very little with his life.

  In 1819, another severe illness struck Goya. It was probably not a recurrence of the one that felled him at the end of 1792, but we do not know enough about its symptoms to be able to say. He was treated for it, though the doctor’s notes on medication, if he made any, have not survived. The doctor was his friend Eugenio García Arrieta. Goya commemorated his gratitude to this man, whom he trusted implicitly and who saved his life, in a double portrait of healer and patient that bore a long inscription, in the manner of the ex-votos commonly hung in Spanish churches, thanking Mary or a saint for miraculous intervention in a crisis. It gives no clue about the nature of the disease: “Goya in gratitude to his friend Arrieta for the skill and great care with which he saved his life in his acute and dangerous illness, suffered at the end of 1819, at the age of seventy-three years. He painted this in 1820.” A faint clue to the nature of Goya’s malady may lie in th
e fact that Dr. Arrieta is known to have gone to North Africa in 1820 to study Eastern plague. Epidemics of such plagues, which included yellow fever, happened from time to time in Spain because of contagions brought by Mediterranean shipping. Since Arrieta was considered a plague specialist, Goya may have been stricken by such a virus. But this is highly speculative.

  In Goya’s portrait, Arrieta bends over him, protectively encircling him with his arm and holding up, with gentle insistence, a glass of medicine for him to drink. Goya seems to be at death’s door. He sits up in bed, but with difficulty. His head lolls away from Arrieta, and you can almost hear his labored breathing. His hands pluck restlessly at the counterpane. Behind him are several figures, not identifiable in the gloom, which have been variously interpreted as concerned friends, psychopomps, soul-snatching devils waiting for his death (unlikely, this), and modernized Fates.

  The whole image exhales a strong religious atmosphere, a reverence for Arrieta as curandero (healer). It could hardly be less like Goya’s previous depictions of the work of doctors, whom he invariably guyed—as in the Caprichos—as incompetent, stupid quacks, matasanos (killers of the healthy). It has some of the character of a religious icon, meant to remind you of old pictures of the dead Christ supported by angels. But it is conceived in praise of science: science imagined not as “cold,” factual study but as a “warm” channel of empathy. Goya would almost certainly have known the work of the English artist Joseph Wright of Derby—not from the originals, of course (there were none in Spanish collections), but from the engravings of Wright’s pictures, such as An Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump (printed 1769), which were widely circulated and were likely to have found a place in his friend Sebastián Martínez’s voluminous collection. The lighting, from below, is particularly reminiscent of Wright, but most striking of all is the spirit of admiration for science. The painting shows Goya growing in sympathy for doctors, a group he once despised, for assuaging his feeble age.