Goya Page 11

  Above all, Cadalso wrote, the petimetre—and his equally affected other half, the petimetra—must be a multinational of consumption, taking his pleasures and signs of status from all over the world, not just from provincial Spain, drinking his mocha coffee in a Chinese porcelain cup, wearing a Dutch shirt whose cotton is woven in Lyons, reading a book bound in Paris while riding in an English coach.

  Goya, El espejo indiscreto: el hombre mono (“The indiscreet mirror: man/monkey”), 1797-99. Pen and sepia wash, 20.6 × 14.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 3.10)

  The petimetre was a solution to one of the problems with earlier Spanish masculinity: exacerbated pride and easily offended honor. He was now a lover, not a fighter, and where better to affirm this than on his face? No more, wrote Ramón de la Cruz in his piece El petimetre, the hairy macho with his cara poblada, his “populated” or bristling face: today, the smooth skin and emulgent pomades declare, “wherever we go, that we are men of peace.” In any case, the provocations to fight, the ways of giving mortal offense, have diminished. Time was, wrote Cruz, when duels and follies were common, but their frequency depended on the existence of chaste women, pious widows, virtuous wives, folk without affectations, and gentlemen who kept their word; now all that has changed, and there is much less need to resort to swordplay. You had to keep your hair on. And it was uncool to make any display of patriotism. You must speak ill of Spain; fashion advised you must joke about your ancestors and listen respectfully to the opinions of barbers, dancing masters, and cooks.

  The anti-type of the petimetre was the majo, with his companion, the maja. The petimetre aspired to be taken for an upper-class Frenchman. The currutaco considered himself above everyone of his own class. The majo, by contrast, wished to be seen as entirely and truculently Spanish, and a man of the people. (Majo presumably comes from macho.) The two exactly opposite types to a large extent expressed their differences in the way they dressed and talked. You might say that the majo represented nature—Spanish nature—while the petimetre stood for artifice. The former regarded the latter as effete and laughable; the latter saw the former as crude and somewhat threatening, flashy, and loutish. No wonder that the ranks of the petimetres were full of not conspicuously highbred people trying to claw their way up the rungs of Madrid, while among the highborn and talented there was a fashion for dressing and behaving in majo or maja style. Goya’s own habits of dress—and probably of conversation too, to judge from the idioms he used in his unbuttoned letters to his friends—were a fine instance of the latter. The majo style was sexier, more earthy, if that is the right word for a movement of fashion entirely confined to the cities—rural peasantry hardly had the time or the appetite for dressing up as anything. Majo fashion for men still exists, in a theatrical form. Bullfighters wear it in the arena: the tight breeches and stockings, the sash, the embroidered “suit of lights.” Goya himself liked to wear it; it was natural that he should adopt the air of a tough guy in the city, like a successful artist in 1960s New York wearing a black leather jacket. Thus he appears in the Self-portrait in the Studio (frontispiece, c. 1794-95) half silhouetted against the white light pouring through the big window of what was probably his studio at 1, calle del Desengano: the pot hat with its candleholders stuck in the brim was part of his normal painting gear, because he liked to add the finishing touches at night, but he is not likely to have regularly worked in that embroidered, red-braided bullfighter’s jacket, which, together with Goya’s direct and level gaze, makes its statement clearly: I can’t be fooled, I’m tough, I am a man of the people, I know what I see. I am a majo. Or perhaps, more precisely, a manolo, which was the correct term for the kind of majo found only in the streets and alleys of Madrid, the eponymous hero of one of Ramón de la Cruz’s more popular sainetes.

  Goya, Un majo sentado con espada (“Seated majo with sword”), Drawing, Instituto Valencia (illustration credit 3.11)

  Goya, Maja, 1824-28. Etching and drypoint, 19 × 12 cm. The Hispanic Society of America, New York. (illustration credit 3.12)

  To see what majas wore, one need only look at Goya’s portraits of the duchess of Alba or of Queen María Luisa, who liked to display herself as a sexy woman of the people—admittedly, with less success than la Alba. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that sometimes petimetres and their consorts would bow to fashion by dressing as majos and majas.

  Their world was Goya’s world also. In due course, after graduating (as it were) to Madrid in the 1770s, Goya would turn himself into one of the greatest portrait painters of his age. To do so required a brilliant ability to perceive, and set down in pencil and paint, the nuances of individual character. This Goya developed, but it was not what his early work for the court required. There he was dealing with standard types, the cast of the theater, the human fauna of the Madrid streets, and turning the results into decorative ensembles for the palace of El Pardo and other royal residences. In effect, he would be making sainetes in paint on canvas, which would then be turned into tapestries. The royal order authorizing this was issued from the palace at Aranjuez in June 1786: “The king has been pleased to nominate Don Ramón Bayeu and Don Francisco Goya, so that under the supervision of His Majesty’s artists, Don Francisco Bayeu and Don Mariano Maella, they should paint the designs to be woven in the Royal Factory … granting to each of them fifteen thousand reales a year.” Fifteen thousand! It seemed like a fortune to the forty-year-old artist. “Martín mío,” he crowed in a letter to Zapater,

  I am now Painter to the King with fifteen thousand reales, and although I’ve no time I have to let you know how the King sent out an order to Bayeu and Maella to search out the best two painters that could be found to paint the cartoons for tapestries.… Bayeu proposed his brother, and Maella proposed me. Their advice was put before the King and the favor was done, and I had no idea of what was happening to me.13

  Now began the most exuberantly busy period of Goya’s life, filled with tapestry designs, portraits, private and Church commissions, and social maneuverings. It would last about fifteen years.

  FROM TAPESTRY TO SILENCE

  BETWEEN 1775 AND 1792, Goya painted more than sixty cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory. They were full-size and in full color. Some were very large indeed, as much as thirteen feet wide. It was a good and regular job but not a very sought-after one, because the work was not open to further public exhibition—only the royal family, their guests, and servants would see it. In any case, the prestige to be won from designing a tapestry of the pueblo at work or play was nothing compared with having a portrait of Carlos IV hanging in the Royal Palace, any more than a portrait of Nell Gwyn would have brought its author the same kudos as one of King Charles. That Goya’s designs would be translated into wool imposed restrictions. Tapestry could not capture the complicated surfaces created by impasto and glazing that were beginning to characterize Goya’s painted works: it was inherently matte, broader in treatment, and simpler. Not infrequently, Goya found himself obliged to “edit out” some of the more complex passages of color shift and texture in the cartoons before they could be translated into weavings. The cartoons were life-size but inherently disposable; and as Bayeu complained in a memorandum, once the final tapestries had been woven from them, the designs themselves were rolled up and stored out of sight in the factory, never to be consulted again. Goya’s designs vanished, but in 1868, more than three-quarters of a century after they were made, they turned up, mostly in good condition, in the basement of the Royal Palace. Most of them are now in the Prado.

  Their advantage to Goya was that they set him free from doing routine ecclesiastical commissions, whose results were quite often dull. Better still, they put him squarely in the Bourbon court, in a fairly menial capacity to be sure, but nevertheless within the orbit of royal patronage—and that was always likely to be better than work for hard-bargaining, peseta-pinching priests. The tapestry designs may have been somewhat conventional. They took city life, cleaned it up
for noble and royal consumption, and submitted it to some of the conventions of the fěte galante. But at least they let him plunge into the life he knew best: not the transcendental world of angels and saints, not the circumscribed one of Jesus doing his holy deeds, not the implausible miracles of Christian saints, but life as it was lived in the streets of Madrid and the countryside beyond.

  To call Goya, in this phase of his work, a realist is putting it much too strongly. The main influence on his tapestry designs was Antoine Watteau. He did not know Watteau’s work at first hand, since no examples of it had found their way into the royal collections in Madrid. But he would certainly have known it in reproduction, since engravings after Watteau were widely disseminated. By the 1770s, half a century after his death, his fětes galantes were widely imitated all over Europe. In any case, the style had already found a practitioner in Madrid: Michel-Ange Houasse, who had obtained a place at Felipe V’s court through the recommendation of the king’s powerful French finance minister, the count Jean Orry, and in the last year of his life had executed two large cartoon designs for the Royal Tapestry Factory. Since Goya’s task was to provide décor for the rooms of a royal family of moderately ilustrado tastes, Watteau was an ideal model, for his vision of a world of charming social harmony and exquisite manners, in which all social classes were united in the pursuit of harmonious pleasure, dancing and listening to music, was bound to appeal. In Jutta Held’s words, “In the eighteenth century there was no genre painting that took for its theme fiestas and games, luxury and conversation, or the apparent leisure of the upper classes that was not affected by the ideas and esthetic models of Watteau.”1

  Unlike Watteau, Goya did not base his characters either on the nobility (which hardly makes an appearance in the cartoons) or on the commedia dell’arte (whose characters make none at all). He took them from cleaned-up, lower-class, town and country life—and especially from the majos and their consorts. He was finding stock characters doing typical things, almost exactly as Ramón de la Cruz had picked them out for his sainetes and farces. When Goya’s tapestry scenes are violent and dramatic, as some are, it is always in a tongue-in-cheek way. We are a long way from the later works—the corrosive skepticism of the Caprichos, let alone the terrible didactic realism of the Desastres de la guerra. The spirit of the tapestry cartoons is altogether gentler, as it had to be, given that members of the royal family and their friends were to be amused by them for the foreseeable future. There is no sign yet that Goya chafed against the restrictions of turning them out, though later he would.

  Goya, Riña en la Venta Nueba (Fight at the New Inn), 1777. Oil on canvas, 275 × 414 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.1)

  This was true even of the harsher passages, such as the brawl outside a country inn that was to decorate the dining room of the Pardo Palace. Fighting proles, to eighteenth-century court taste, seemed no more inherently “violent” than squabbling dogs or, at worst, lions in conflict. They could be amusing and decorative, provided that their lower status was observed and they didn’t get killed or unpleasantly wounded. This was one of the ground rules of the tapestry designs, observed in such large compositions as Fight at the New Inn (1777). Coachmen and muleteers in the dress of various Spanish provinces have converged at a ramshackle country inn. Two of them, presumably Andalusians, are dressed in majo style, with short jackets and sashes; three others are in more ordinary peasant rig, implying (according to Goya’s own notes that came with the sketch when it was submitted for approval) that they are from Murcia. They begin to gamble—the cards and ante money are on a table to the right, where the innkeeper is surreptitiously scooping them up—and then to scuffle, and to fight, until they are rolling around on the ground, pummeling one another with fists and sticks; a cutlass has been drawn, but it now lies disregarded. The trick of unifying this very wide and narrow composition is neatly done by the long shafts of the carriage in the background, whose shallow curve is carried further by the gesture of the red-coated brawler who throws out his arm in anger and pain toward the right of the picture; this curve is echoed by the back and tail of the furiously barking house dog. At the left, a similar extension of the sinuous curve is given by the extended arm of a man who is about to hurl a stone into the melée. Against the wall of the inn, a mounted man in a pink coat—possibly one of the horse guards who often accompanied travelers—is trying to draw a pistol, while a hostler restrains the horse.

  Seen on the wall of the palace dining room, the design and its subject would have reminded Prince Carlos, María Luisa, and their guests of the “picturesque” poverty of places they themselves would never have entered: the country ventas, the lowest class of inn. The Hogarthian sign that projects from a round window in this dump’s pediment, reading VENTA NUEBA, “New Inn,” is belied by the architecture—the building is just a two-floor ruin. (In the oil sketch for the cartoon, another name is lettered crudely on the façade: MESÓN DEL GALLO, “Cock Inn.” On top of the pediment is a bent and leaning crucifix, which must have been suppressed in the final version to spare the sensibilities of the more pious royal guests.) Such places were described in detail by the English traveler Richard Ford some years later, but there is no reason to suppose that they had changed in any way. His main advice to those seeking shelter on Spanish roads is a Spanish proverb: No le busques cinco pies al gato (Don’t look for five feet on a cat). The venta was, in terms of comfort and cleanliness, far below the parador, the mesón, the fonda, or the posada. Accommodations for men and horses were on the same ground floor; the servants (such as there were) took no notice of the guests; the mattresses (if they existed) felt as though they were filled with walnut shells. “The accommodation for the beast is excellent,” wrote Ford, from long and philosophically endured experience, but,

  as regards man, it is just the reverse; he must forage abroad for anything he may want. Only a small part of the barn is allotted him, and there he is lodged among the brutes below, or among the trusses and sacks of their food in the lofts above. He finds, in spite of all this, that if he asks the owner what he has got, he will be told that “there is everything,” hay de todo, just as the rogue of a ventero informed Sancho Panza that his empty larder contained all the birds of the air, all the beasts of the earth, all the fishes of the sea.

  The poet Góngora, Ford points out, compared these country inns to Noah’s ark—“and in truth they do contain a number of animals, from the big to the small, and more than a pair, of more than one kind of the latter.” Enormous slaughters must be done every night, and the walls are stained with their results: “Hence the proverbial expression for great mortality among men, mueren como chinches [they die like bedbugs].”2

  Goya, Merienda a orillas del Manzanares (Picnic on the Banks of the Manzanares), 1776. Oil on canvas, 272 × 295 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.2)

  Naturally, Goya cleaned up the reality. Bedbugs would not do for a dining room in the Pardo Palace. But the brawl at the inn must have served to remind the royal guests how gratifyingly wide a gulf was fixed between them and their subjects.

  Generally, the collective hero of the tapestries is the majo, just as he is onstage in the sainetes. In both forms, as Klingender points out, “majaism appeared as an exuberant manifestation of popular virility.”3 It’s a man’s world, though with women in it. Goya’s majos stand with their legs insolently straddled, their gestures are confident and curt, they blow cigarette smoke, and nobody and nothing gets in the way of their masculine bonding. This is made plain in one of his most spectacular tapestry cartoons, Picnic on the Banks of the Manzanares (1776). Goya was very proud of it, proud enough to stress that the masterfully complex design with its variety of fully realized characters, which form a veritable theater of narrative, was “de ynvención mía” (of my invention). It is one of the few cartoons for which numerous preliminary drawings have survived. Most of these are of costume details, to which Goya paid special attention, careful to preserve th
e right look of majo and maja dress.

  Five young men are having a picnic in the open air, perhaps on the banks of the Manzanares. It is a frequented place—five others are standing in small groups in the middle distance—but those in the foreground claim our attention. They are obviously having a fine time, drinking and eating, and none too abstemiously: we can see three wine bottles, and a flask may also contain wine, although it could be olive oil. The food and its containers make a handsome, scattered still life, with the gleam of the pewter dishes and the warm, beautifully rendered glow of a copper casserole. They are near the end of the meal, to judge from the broken bread and the orts of stew on one of those dishes. The majo on the left, a sturdy young guy in red britches with his hair in a net and his rapier in his hand, is sucking greedily on a homemade cigarette. Two others are boisterously raising their glasses to a sixth person who has just come within their range—a coquettish, sexy naranjera, an orange seller with her basket of ripe fruit, who is pointing offstage in a fairly unmistakable gesture of invitation: buy my oranges, says this maja, and you get something else to peel, though not necessarily for free. She is a figure straight out of the sainetes and cheap popular prints of the time, but so are the five men, and they all belong together—sumptuously dressed in common cloth, having fun in a proletarian paradise. Such a painting is a middle term between the Arcadian scenes of Titian and the sardonic charm of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Picturesque: yes. Stereotypical: that too, but a masterpiece, just as the seduction duet between Don Giovanni and Zerlina, “La ci darem la mano,” is also a masterpiece.