Goya Page 13
Nevertheless, he had a king and queen to amuse and palaces to decorate, and it would be idle to expect that, at this stage of his career, he could have made tapestry the medium for the sort of ferocities that would before long burgeon on the printed leaves of the Caprichos. Carlos and María Luisa still wanted their comedy of manners, their bucolic amusements. But now Goya’s rendition becomes more shadowed. A work like El pelele (The Straw Man; 1791-92) has a disenchanted edge to it. A traditional carnival game in which a stuffed cloth dolly of a man is tossed in a blanket or cloak by women: it was a subject Goya would return to at intervals, its last appearance in his work being in the etching Disparate femenino (1816-23) (this page). In the tapestry design, the manikin, with its silly French pigtail and spots of rouge on its cheeks, looks vacuous to perfection, a petimetre jounced up and down at the whim of the four amused ladies—Goya’s acid comment on the power of women over men, and on what seemed to him the waning of traditional Spanish masculinity, a theme repeated throughout the Caprichos and the Disparates. Goya was always on the side of the homegrown majo, whom he considered an endangered species, as against the imported fopperies of the petimetre—and never more explicitly so than here.
His frankest utterance about this, apart from the later Caprichos, was the painting Hercules and Omphale (1784) (this page). It depicts one of the great images of sexual inversion bequeathed to us by the ancient world. Hercules, the hero of gigantic strength, has been condemned by the voice of Apollo speaking through the Delphic oracle to lose his famed virility. From now on he will be the slave of the queen of Lydia, Omphale, who maliciously decrees that he will be dressed in women’s clothes. At the same time he must continue with his heroic deeds, like destroying a dragon and killing a dangerous bandit, Syleus. But Apollo’s overriding command insists that he should be completely feminized, turned over to women’s work like sewing. In Goya’s painting, though Hercules is still dressed in full, shining male armor, the dragon is reduced to a mere decoration, squirming on his helmet as he struggles, not very effectively it seems, to thread a needle under the mocking eyes of Omphale. One of the queen’s attendants has taken over his monster-killing sword. He is a figure of fun whose submissiveness betokens extreme anxiety, for this is the only subject of all the hundreds available that Goya took directly from the repertoire of classical myth and lore.
Goya, El pelele (The Straw Man), 1791-92. Oil on canvas, 35.6 × 23.2 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.13)
Goya, Hércules y Onfala (Hercules and Omphale), 1784. Oil on canvas, 81 × 64 cm. Private collection. (illustration credit 4.14)
Goya, La boda (The Wedding), 1791-92. Oil on canvas, 267 × 293 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.15)
A big work like The Wedding (1791-92) also has an edge that was not present in the earlier, milder tapestry cartoons. Country nuptials are in progress, and the party is leaving the church, passing by the broad, framing arch of a bridge. We see a satisfied and smiling priest; an old grandpa picking his way over the broken, dried-out pavement with a stick; a piper blowing forcibly on his rustic instrument; joyous, unruly kids; women casting sidelong glances of envy at the bride. The girl is lovely: about eighteen, composed, and dressed in her utmost finery. (Only in the original can one see that, as Tomlinson points out,10 she has dressed so hastily, or with so little experience of fashion, that her brand-new shoes are stuck on the wrong feet.) The groom is comical and gross. His snub nose and thick lips proclaim him to be an indiano, the mixed-blood heir of some Spanish colonist who made his fortune in the New World; now he has come back to his father’s village to find the novia of his heart’s desire. Fat and anxiously mincing, his clothes out of date, he is unimpressive despite his bulk; but in this provincial town, poderoso caballero es Don Dinero (Mr. Moneybags is a mighty gentleman).
APART FROM ENGRAVINGS AND TAPESTRY DESIGNS, Goya’s career in Madrid was beginning to sprout a tentative branch in another direction: church decoration. He would not get a commission in Madrid as big as his “hidden” murals for the Aula Dei outside Zaragoza—not until he came to fresco the church of San Antonio de la Florida some twenty years later—but he did get one substantial job.
The Madrid church of San Francisco el Grande was indeed a large one. It boasted the biggest dome in Spain, 105 feet in diameter. It was patronized and worshipped in by the royal family; Joaquín Eleta, confessor to Carlos III, was a Franciscan, and his order enjoyed an unchallenged supremacy in court circles after the Jesuits were expelled from Spain.11 Now it offered a large job for no fewer than seven painters: seven new altarpieces. Goya was among the chosen artists. The idea thrilled him. His Majesty, he wrote to Zapater, “has chosen to include me, whose commissioning letter is being sent to Goicoechea [a considerable patron of the arts in provincial Zaragoza] so that he might show it to those who have doubted my merit, and you will take it where you know it will have an effect: for the great Bayeu is also painting his picture.”12 Translation: show it to my brother-in-law and make him jealous, make him realize that I’m treading on his tail. What was almost as important as the commission itself was the names of the other artists—a virtual list of the Madrid painting establishment of the time, most of whom (such being the sadness of establishments) are now all but forgotten: Mariano Maella, Gregorio Ferro, Andrés de la Calleja, José del Castillo, Antonio González Velázquez, and Francisco Bayeu doing the big piece for the high altar.
Goya, San Bernardino de Siena predicando ante el rey Alonso V de Aragón (St. Bernardino of Siena Preaching Before King Alonso V of Aragón), 1781-83. Oil on canvas, 480 × 300 cm. Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.16)
Goya chose as his subject St. Bernardino of Siena Preaching Before Alfonso of Aragón. With his usual modesty, the painter crowed to his friend Zapater that this was the biggest painting of all the commissions.13 It is a tall vertical composition showing St. Bernardino, the fourteenth-century Italian saint, standing on a rock, bathed in light from the miraculous star that had descended on him as he was reciting the praises of Mary as Queen of Angels, brandishing a crucifix, and speaking to a crowd whose main figure is Alfonso of Aragón, the Spanish king of Naples. Here Goya, as he admitted in a letter to the royal supervisor of the commission, the count of Floridablanca, departed from strict historical accuracy: the king in question had been the Angevin king Renato of Sicily, but Goya thought it more diplomatically suitable to replace him with a Spanish monarch since this was a royal Spanish church. He also inserted himself into the painting: his own likeness, in a yellow tunic, stares out at the viewer from the right side, below the extended hand of St. Bernardino with its rhetorical crucifix.
No church commission was ever awarded without politicking and backbiting, and Goya’s painting for San Francisco el Grande was certainly no exception. He had his clerical critics—swarms of them, to judge from a heavily coded letter he sent to Zapater at the time. Goya mentions none by name—that would have been most imprudent—but he makes no secret of disliking them. Interestingly, he describes them in metaphorical terms that would perfectly fit the characters whom, fifteen years later, he would ridicule in the Caprichos.
Beloved soulmate … you’ll kiss my ass at least seven times if I manage to convince you of the crazy happiness I get from living here, even though there’s been no progress regarding the source of income you know about. How good your little room with the chocolate that brought us together was, but it offered no freedom and was not free of the various insects with their deadly weapons, made of needles and penknives, which, if you don’t watch out and even if you do, will tear away your flesh and your hair as well; not only do they scratch you and look for pretexts for quarreling, but they bite, spit, stick you, and run you through; they often become food for other, bigger and worse ones … even when they’re buried, they don’t know how to be harmless, for in their cruelty they even go for nearby corpses, and you can’t find a spot far enough away from them to escape their cruelty. T
his infection is general in every town where you might be born, especially if you’re modestly off and if you have a small dwelling place.14
Anton Raphael Mengs, dictator of taste, had died in 1779. However, his influence lingered in Spain, and nobody forgot whom he had endorsed. It was probably due to Mengs’s original interest that Goya got the most important of his early portrait commissions. Portraiture was the bread and butter of any moderately successful artist, and the earliest known portrait attributable to Goya was one of the count of Miranda del Castanar, probably done around 1773 while he was at work on the big murals for the Aula Dei, before he left Zaragoza. In 1782, working now in Madrid, he did a portrait of Antonio de Vega, a minister of the Royal Council and, later, the director of the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara, for which Goya was doing his cartoons. But the project for which Goya had the highest hopes was one Mengs may once have suggested: a life-size likeness of José Moñino, the count of Floridablanca (1728-1808), who was chief minister to Carlos III and, after him, the most powerful secular figure in the realm. Goya painted it in 1783.
Moñino had begun as a commoner, a lawyer in his home region of Murcia. But he became the protégé of the marqués de Esquilache, the chief administrator who was Carlos’s controversial import from Italy and whose hat-and-cloak rules had provoked the Motín d’Esquilache in 1766. Carlos believed this riot had been fomented by the Jesuits. It was not true, but he had to get rid of Esquilache as a sop to popular anger. Meanwhile he set Moñino to work getting rid of the Jesuits, which he did with such acumen that the whole order was expelled from Spain in 1767. (The king threw them out not from any Enlightenment objections to them as the agents of an absolutist Church but because he felt they were more loyal to the pope than to him—and he was right about that.) Carlos III then ennobled Moñino as the conde de Floridablanca and, in 1777, made him prime minister.
This had been a shrewd appointment. Floridablanca was no radical by more northerly standards; in years to come he would vigorously oppose the French Revolution and anyone who sympathized with it. But he was a practical reformer with a strong belief in free trade and lower taxes; this alone, he believed, would stimulate economic growth in Spain, and leading ilustrados like Jovellanos, disciple of Adam Smith, agreed with him.
Floridablanca was particularly concerned about public works. The whole infrastructure of rural Spain had languished since the disasters of the fifteenth century that had, ever since, been treated as an immense triumph: the defeat and expulsion of the Arabs, and the resulting centralization of power under Fernando and Isabel in Madrid. The Madrid court had pulled the landowning Catholic aristocracy toward it, as though into the gravitational field of a dark star; and so, by Floridablanca and Goya’s time, the city was jammed with parasitical nobles and hidalgos, all maneuvering for privilege, while the countryside, the true source of Spanish wealth, fell increasingly empty. Canals, tunnels, dikes, dams, and irrigation networks had been brought to a high pitch of perfection under the Arab caliphs; they had turned Andalucía into a fertile garden. But in the three centuries since the reconquista they had largely fallen into ruin as one titled landowner after another deserted his inherited estates for an idler’s life at court. The more its patrimony turned to stones and dust, the more apt this class was to regard “deep Spain,” the source of its diminishing wealth, as a distant colony, and to treat those who lived in it with blind and even cruel indifference.
Goya, Conde de Floridablanca and Goya, 1783. Oil on canvas, 262 × 166 cm. Banco Urquijo, Madrid. (illustration credit 4.17)
Whether Floridablanca could have cured this dreadful agrarian situation on his own is doubtful at best. (Not even the king could have done that.) But at least he thought it his duty to try, and his views were supported by other, more liberal exponents and theorists of statecraft, such as Campomanes and Jovellanos, the leaders of the Spanish Enlightenment. Floridablanca’s concern with the problem is the partial subject of Goya’s obsequious, cluttered, and emblematic portrait of him.
This is the first of Goya’s “mirror” portraits, in which the subject’s presumed reflection in a presumed mirror (we are the mirror; what we see is what the mirror sees) plays an active part in the story the picture tells. The count, resplendent in red silk with white stockings (not a wrinkle in them) and a pearl-colored waistcoat richly embroidered in gold thread, towers over Goya’s depiction of himself, holding up a small canvas (whose face we cannot see; presumably it bears an image in progress, the likeness of Floridablanca) for his client’s approval. The count holds a pair of spectacles in his right hand. A moment ago he was scrutinizing his painted likeness. Now he stares at the invisible mirror—at us—to check out the resemblance.
The scale of the two figures looks physically wrong but is, in a smarmy way, correct. Goya is closer to us than Floridablanca but looks smaller: an inferior and supplicant figure, almost crouching. He is inches shorter than his client, a declaration of size as status. Likewise, the man behind Floridablanca, with his protractor poised over a site plan on the table before him, seems much smaller than the splendiferous count. He is waiting for his chief to speak—what orders will he issue about the project the plan represents? The expression on his face is a deep deference, close to awe. He is probably the civil engineer Julián Bort.15 Like Goya, he is dark and dun-colored, whereas the count is the very image of power, glowing with light. Indeed, most of the light in the otherwise dark room seems to shine out of Floridablanca, as in earlier religious pictures it shone out of God in heaven—an effect enhanced by the fact that so much of the other paint, including Goya’s brown suit, has darkened over time, whereas the brilliant vermilion of Floridablanca’s outfit has not. So he stands there like a secular god glowing in a chapel. Goya reminds us of Figaro, the little barber of Sevilla, in the presence of Count Almaviva. But the picture contains none of the cheeky anti-authoritarianism of Mozart’s opera. It is completely a celebration of authority—including the penultimate authority, one step below God’s, of the king.
For Carlos III is there too—not in person, but in effigy. Goya could not leave him out, since he wanted to emphasize Floridablanca’s role as a conduit of royal power. This was probably the first time Goya had painted his monarch, and of course he did it from another effigy—painting, print, or bust—certainly not from life, since the little Aragonese painter was not yet a big enough figure to ask, let alone receive, a sitting from his king. We do not notice Carlos at first. But there he is, hanging on the wall at upper right above Floridablanca’s head, an oval painting-within-the-painting. The benignly smiling monarch, an apparition borne up as though on a shield (and wearing, like Floridablanca, the sash of his own order), plainly confers his approval—not only on Goya’s relatively little task of painting his prime minister but, more important, on the vaster project the prime minister himself has in train: the design and construction of the Imperial Canal of Aragón.
The canal was by far the biggest public-works project undertaken in all of Spanish history until well into the industrial era, and no reference to Floridablanca (including Goya’s portrait) could ignore it. One may assume it had a special emblematic meaning for Goya, because, like Floridablanca himself, he was Aragonese. It was to eighteenth-century Spain, and in particular to Aragón, what the Hoover Dam was to 1930s America, or the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme to 1950s Australia. The idea was huge and, in essence, simple: a canal dug clear across the peninsula, linking the Atlantic (the Cantabrian Sea) to the Mediterranean, connecting with the Ebro River near Zaragoza. This would irrigate previously sterile land along the course of the canal, and enormously benefit the Aragonese merchant economy by creating a direct maritime outlet to the Atlantic and thus to the lucrative trade in coffee, ores, slaves, chocolate, and other products with Spain’s American colonies.
Such a canal had first been proposed back in the time of the emperor Charles V. The organized manpower and engineering know-how needed to carry it out—for it was truly an impresa faraónica, a Pha
raonic enterprise—hardly existed. The money was not available. The canal lapsed for two centuries, without a shovelful of earth being turned.
It was then revived by the Bourbons, in the person of Carlos III. Its chief promoters were two: Prime Minister Floridablanca and Ramón de Pignatelli (1734-93). Pignatelli, a tireless, deeply humanistic, and irrepressibly randy cleric, was the canon of the cathedral of Zaragoza, cofounder of the Aragonese Amigos del País (Economic Society of Friends of the Country), and later, for a time, one of the reputed lovers of Queen María Luisa.16 He was one of the very few influential liberal clerics in Spain, outstanding for his defense of small farmers and landless laborers against the interests of the rich and powerful. He foresaw the benefits (mainly through peripheral irrigation) that the canal would offer the poor, especially the jornaleros, or landless day laborers.
If Pignatelli’s sexual abilities were not in doubt—and they certainly impressed Casanova, who paid admiring tribute to the cleric’s uncanonical behavior in his Memoirs—neither were his administrative ones. It was he who organized the necessary civil works for the canal (1776-90), oversaw the planning for its navigation, and directed the irrigation schemes along its course—which increased the amount of arable land beside the canal by a factor of 30 to 250 percent.
The money was to come from the biggest investment in a public-works project ever attempted, or even conceived, in Spain up to then: 200 million reales. It was raised by Floridablanca, mostly from empréstitos, public loans. In the end, for reasons too complex to discuss here, the Imperial Canal failed to transform the economy of Aragón, and it received its coup de grâce from the damage inflicted on it by the French occupation of 1808-14. Hydraulic power from the unfinished canal would be of some benefit to industries around Zaragoza, but this was nothing compared with the first sanguine hopes of its success. These, in the 1780s, presented the canal as the capstone of Floridablanca’s career—which was why Goya loaded his portrait with references to it. The plan that engineer Bort is measuring with his protractor is a layout for part of the canal. Large engineering drawings for it on stiff paper are propped against the table, inscribed to the excelentísimo count.