Goya Page 12
If the orange seller is a maja, a woman of the people, the girl in The Parasol (1777) is emphatically of a higher class: a petimetra, in fact, dressed at the height of French fashion and straight out of the pages of a French stylebook. Instead of leading the man on, she distinguishes herself from him by gesture and gaze; she is looking at us, not at him; she is settled in her pose—the lapdog, a little spaniel, makes that clear—and she seems to accept the shade of the green parasol the young cortejo holds as though it were entirely her due. Goya makes no pretense about her clothes. They are of the utmost elegance: that light-pink mantle trimmed with dark fur, perhaps sable; that elegant blue bodice; the yellow skirt, given a discreet swirling movement by its folds. Color rhymes with color. The dark green of the quitasol echoes the similar green of the trees on the right. The girl’s red turban goes with the young majo’s waistcoat and even with a touch of red on the spaniel’s collar. The black of the girl’s hair conforms with the broad hem of her pelisse, her dog’s coat, her cortejo’s knotted scarf, and so on. The whole design has an Italian formality and stability: a pyramid whose background is converted into a pair of diagonals formed, on the left, by the wall vanishing in perspective and, on the right, by the slender sapling behind the young man. This fondness for steady, stable compositions based on Xs, diagonals, pyramids, and other plainly geometrical forms came from outside Spain. It was a relief from the Rococo stylization that older Spanish court painters like Paret were still engaged with. It will become one of Goya’s most telling stylistic hallmarks, even (or, perhaps one should rather say, especially) when the subject itself is brutal and turbulent, as in so many of the Caprichos and the Desastres de la guerra. It is a permanent legacy to Goya from both Neoclassicism and the mid-eighteenth-century compositions he had encountered in prints and studied, in the original, in Italy.
Goya, El quitasol (The Parasol), 1777. Oil on canvas, 104 × 152 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.3)
His commission was to amuse, and one way of doing it was by depicting sports and games, such as a form of blindman’s buff known as la gallina ciega, “the blind chicken.” A blindfolded man is in the center of a ring of players, who are holding hands; with a wooden spoon, he lunges at one of them, trying to touch him, but his target ducks amid general hilarity. In other tapestry designs people play on swings. They lie drunkenly on the ground, shielding their ears with their hands from the tuneless singing of a friend. This in itself is very different from Watteau, who would never have disturbed his idealized vision of relations between men and women with such a discordant and ironic note. Girls balance cántaros, earthenware waterpots, on their heads, a none-too-indirect reference to precious virginities that can so easily be broken.
Goya, La gallina ciega (The Blind Chicken), 1788. Oil on canvas, 41 × 44 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.4)
Very occasionally a darker event intrudes in Goya’s tapestries, as in one likely influenced by Carlos III’s concern with the dignity of manual labor (as against the moral squalor of the idle rich). In 1778 the king’s solicitor general, the enlightened economist Pedro Campomanes, had persuaded him to issue a royal decree affirming that manual work, such as tanning, was “honest and honorable; their practice does not degrade the family.” Another royal edict of 1778 laid down rules and standards for masonry work, such as the proper form of scaffolding and the employer’s responsibility for injuries sustained by workers.4 This is commemorated in Goya’s tapestry cartoon of an unfortunate injured mason, being carried to safety from the site of a work accident by two concerned fellow workers. (Another, almost identical version has the workman sodden drunk, not hurt.) It is not clear how interested Goya was in labor reform, if at all. More likely he alluded to it because it interested his royal clientele. Images like The Injured Mason are not common in his early court work; his truly passionate concern with the exploitation of workers will not surface until the Caprichos, some fifteen years later. More often all is light and amiable, as in the funny and slightly risqué episodes of rural life.
Goya, El albañil herido (The Injured Mason), 1786-87. Oil on canvas, 268 × 110 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.5)
Goya, La primavera o Las floreras (Spring or The Flower Gatherers), 1786-87. Oil on canvas, 277 × 192 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.6)
Thus in one of a set depicting the four seasons, Spring or The Flower Gatherers (1786-87), a lady of quality is accepting a rose from a bouquet culled by a young servant woman (or a girl dressed as a peasant) while her daughter tugs at her hand to get her to notice the bunch of wildflowers she has picked. The punch line of the image is in the grinning peasant behind them, who is holding up by the legs a young rabbit he has caught and putting a finger to his lips to enjoin us to silence: it is spring, this is the time when rabbits start breeding in earnest, and soon the young lady is going to be in love as well.
The art historian Janis Tomlinson speculates, and she is surely right, that Goya’s fondness for the popular theater of the streets and farms must have appealed to María Luisa and the future Carlos IV in a way that it did and could not to the more straitlaced Carlos III.5 It was for the young couple that Goya designed a set of tapestries on the theme of the annual fair held in the streets of Madrid. This was not the kind of narrative that would have seemed right among the official grandeurs of the Palacio Real in Madrid, but it suited the more relaxed atmosphere of one of the country palaces of the prince of Asturias and his amusable Italian consort, used as she was to the pleasures of the commedia dell’arte. Its centerpiece was The Blind Guitarist (1778). Blind guitarists and blind storytellers, like dwarves, hunchbacks, and idiots, were a steady feature of Madrid street life, whose tastes were not inhibited by considerations of political correctness. Blindness and story singing were anciently linked—there was a not-too-remote association with blind Homer. They would be regular subjects for Spanish painters from Velázquez to Picasso, and Goya’s guitarist is one of the most obvious prototypes of the misérabliste figures from the latter’s Blue Period—except that, unlike Picasso, Goya was not at all sentimental in depicting his. The design is meant as an assembly of social types, high to low. At the lowest end are the blind man and his chubby-faced little assistant and guide, his lazarillo, and off to the right, a hunchbacked (or perhaps merely stooping) Negro water seller, in black hat and red britches, with a water jar slung across his back. At the top of the scale is a man with a staff, wearing a yellow coat; this, Goya’s inventory declares, is a foreign tourist, well-off to judge from his spotless finery and twin watch fobs, and he is reaching into his pocket, perhaps to retrieve some change for the poor blind man.6 The girl next to him, a pretty young maja, notices this gesture and is emphatically giving him the eye. Again, the main composition is a shallower version of Goya’s favorite triangle, its apex the figure of a majo on horseback.
Goya, El ciego de la guitarra (The Blind Guitarist), 1778. Oil on canvas, 260 × 311 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.7)
In these designs Goya comments on human types, of course, but he also has some sly observations to make about taste and history. Fashions in art, for example, change; and in his cartoon for The Fair of Madrid (1778), we see them doing so. Here another resplendently dressed dandy, also in yellow, has paused beside a booth whose owner is selling old, unwanted junk: carpets, a tattered blue coat on a stick, basins, copperware, furniture. And a portrait, which is hanging on the wall. It is clearly an out-of-date picture from sometime in the seventeenth century: a brown ancestor whom no one wants. The dandy’s friend, a gentleman in a brilliant red cutaway coat, examines it from a distance with a quizzing glass, showing no enthusiasm. Thus, by implication, young Goya—he is thirty-two now—declares that his kind of genre painting is modern, the coming thing. The owner of the booth bows and scrapes before them, in much the same posture as that in which Goya, five years later, will show himself displaying to his first really
powerful client, the conde de Floridablanca, the portrait he has just made.
Goya, La feria de Madrid (The Fair of Madrid), 1778. Oil on canvas, 258 × 218 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.8)
The Crockery Vendor (1778) is the companion to this painting, a scene of a street transaction, with the difference (among others) that the potential clients are women, not men. The main female figure kneels on the ground of the open-air market, turning and weighing a china bowl in her hand (and how beautifully painted the still life of crockery is, highlights and all!), but her eyes are sizing up the male crockery seller himself, and the placement of the old woman next to her recalls one of Goya’s favorite and most often repeated sexually charged pairings, the young whore and the old celestina, or procuress. Behind them, a petimetre seen from the back, unmistakable in his exaggeratedly long pigtail and bright red coat, is quizzing a lady of quality in her passing coach. Isolated and framed in the bright rectangle of the vehicle’s window, she looks like an icon. The girl in The Haw Seller (1778) is by contrast completely a maja, surrounded by majos who want only to ogle her and make a pass. Their lust bounces off her self-confident, flirtatious charm. Grinning, she casts a glance over her shoulder at you, the viewer. The red fruit in her basket, which she has picked with such effort—gathering the berries was hot, sweaty work—fairly glows, a symbol of libido ready to be let loose.
Goya, The Crockery Vendor, 1778. Oil on canvas, 155 × 132 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.9)
The tapestry cartoons were not the only official, or semi-official, work that came Goya’s way at the end of the 1780s. There was also engraving. Spain, admittedly, had only a sparse culture of reproduction at the time. There were, as previously noted, no museums in which a young painter could study; he must therefore be content with looking at reproductions made by engravers, and the supply of these was both irregular and limited. A wide range of reproductory engravings of masterpieces could be assembled in London, Paris, and Rome, and fairly cheaply; some artists made a reasonably steady living producing them, as Marcantonio Raimondi, for instance, had with Raphael, Dürer, and the Antique in the sixteenth century. But there was no equal to Raimondi, in terms of range of sources or technical quality, in eighteenth-century Madrid. Because the royal palaces were closed to the public, including nearly all artists, it was simply impossible for an aspiring Spanish painter to get much of a firsthand impression of the work of his few national masters, including even the greatest of all, Diego Velázquez. This struck many people as a cultural misfortune (as indeed it was), and among them was Carlos III’s first court painter, Anton Raphael Mengs, who in 1777 had published a letter praising Velázquez to the skies and lamenting that his work, immured as it was in the strict privacy of the royal collections, was not better known. It was probably pressure from Mengs that secured permission for Goya to take advantage of his palace access and make engraved copies of some of the royal Velázquezes in Madrid, then almost completely unknown outside Spain.7 In this way, Goya was introduced to the difficult art and craft of etching, of which he would become a supreme master. One cannot say that his eventual genius for it showed immediately, but he learned fast, as a comparison of a crude early effort like Flight into Egypt (1770) with his technically far more sophisticated version of Velázquez’s Los borrachos (The Drunkards; 1778) will show. In some ways Velázquez was a good choice to copy in black and white, because he was preeminently a tonal painter and could survive the necessarily crude translation from color. But because his transitions of tone were so uncannily subtle, he was not at all easy to imitate, especially when the only shading technique Goya had was line—he had not attempted aquatint, still less mastered it. However, the Velázquez copies forced Goya to concentrate on etching for the first time, and without them we might not have the extraordinary landmarks in the history of the medium that would begin two decades later, the Caprichos, the Disparates, the Tauromaquia, and the Desastres de la guerra.
Goya, after Velázquez, Los borrachos/Bacchus (“The drunkards/Bacchus”), 1778. Etching on heavy laid paper, 32 × 44 cm. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (illustration credit 4.10)
Goya, El agarrotado (“The garrotted man”). Etching. British Museum, London. (illustration credit 4.11)
Goya’s progress toward these really begins with an early etching that had nothing to do with the Velázquez copies, a study of a garrotted corpse done c. 1779. Next to The Blind Guitarist (15½ × 22½ inches), this was the largest plate he had etched so far (13 × 8½ inches), and it is unlikely that he produced the design for anyone but himself. No edition was ever made of it, and who in any case would have commissioned such a grisly souvenir of capital punishment? To be garrotted was not, in fact, the most disgraceful way to die. The Spaniards considered it relatively humane, almost dignified in comparison to hanging, where one slowly strangled on the gallows, kicking and pissing and shitting. The victim of the garrotte died sitting down, so there was a chance that the spectators might not see his excrement. His neck was encircled by an iron band, which was tightened by a screw and a worm gear, rather like a large hose clamp. The axle of the screw forced its way into the back of the victim’s neck, breaking the cervical vertebrae. The operation was believed, no doubt wrongly, to be more or less painless, and certainly it was relatively quick. That Goya chose such a subject has its own significance, for this was the first of many images of violent death inflicted on victims that would appear in his work in years to come, and it is clearly the first sign of his indignation at the power and methods of the Inquisition that would show itself so vividly in later drawings and paintings: the dead man has been made to hold a cross (as in the later plate from the Desastres de la guerra, “For having a clasp knife”), and attached to his chest is a scapular bearing the image of the crucified Savior on the hill of Golgotha. Plainly, he has been killed by the Inquisition for his heretical views. That Goya had seen such a corpse firsthand is strongly suggested by the figure’s realism, shown in pathetic small details like the dead man’s feet—one with its toes clenched in agony, the other with the toes extended in the flaccidity of death.
At around this time a somewhat more satiric, even brusque note crept into Goya’s tapestry designs. He could hardly have kept it out. We know from his later work that Goya was by temperament saturnine and ironic, and given sometimes to wild flights of self-parody. He cannot have been taking the charming, unproblematic comedies of his tapestry work all that seriously, and by the late 1770s their incessant production must have begun to grate; it was not, to put it mildly, what he felt he was born to do. Another design for the apartments of the prince and princess of Asturias, The Rendezvous (1779-80), shows what was happening. A young woman, richly dressed, reclines morosely in the open air among rocks and thorns, her head resting on her hand. An edge of white handkerchief in that hand shows that she has been weeping. The pose, as Tomlinson has pointed out, is taken from a design in an emblem book by Cesare Ripa, showing a (male) figure in a wilderness landscape with thorns, titled Delizie mondane, “Worldly Delights,” which are of course vain.8 The implication is that she is a repentant prostitute, watched by a group of majos.9
Whatever the reasons, there was a hiatus in Goya’s output of tapestry designs. In any case, they were less needed. In 1780 the king, feeling the financial pressure of his war with England, made economies, one of which was closing the Royal Tapestry Factory. This was not a crippling blow to Goya, but it was a sharp inconvenience because, boring though it often was, his tapestry work was bread and butter. Since Mengs had left the court and gone back to Rome, where he died shortly after (in July 1779), the coveted post of court painter was open. Goya applied for it but, humiliatingly, was rejected. Once again, he had had no luck with selection committees.
So he decided to confront the problem head-on. If he had no job, he could at least become an academician. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando was not much in comparison to the reignin
g institutions in Paris, Rome, or London, but it kept the basic academic faith: that art was subject to teachable rules, which could be modified and broken by individual genius, and that the “artist” was by definition a cut above the “artisan” or “craftsman.” Hence membership in the academy could confer prestige on an artist that he (“she” need rarely apply) might not otherwise acquire, and it was worth making certain concessions to earn that prestige. Only this, one might suspect, explains the work that Goya, in May 1780, submitted as an admission piece to the academy: a Crucified Christ. It is without much doubt the worst painting he ever did. How could the man who would emerge, some thirty years later, as the most powerful reporter of human anguish in all of Western art have produced this soapy piece of bondieuserie? The ladylike body, unmarked by torment; the absence of any kind of empathy with what real bodies underwent in the course of flogging and crucifixion; the enervated “correctness” of pose—all this combines to convey a sort of sickly, moaning piety that, if it were not for the relative liveliness of the paint and its impeccable provenance, would make you doubt it was by Goya at all.
Goya, Cristo crucificado (The Crucified Christ), 1780. Oil on canvas, 255 × 153 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.12)
But it worked. Goya won his membership in the academy.
It was not only a religious painting, but a history painting, which gave it in the academics’ eyes a dignity that no tapestry cartoon of sexy orange sellers and cigarette-puffing majos could aspire to. Perhaps this was not surprising, since Goya had made his smooth, licked Christ look stylistically as close to Mengs as possible.