Goya Read online

  What was this illness? It is impossible to say, because no modern diagnosis can be made; there simply isn’t the evidence. Goya’s deafness is one of the insoluble mysteries of art’s medical history, ranking with Vincent van Gogh’s madness and depression. It has been variously attributed to Ménière’s syndrome (auditory vertigo), botulism, polio, hepatitis, and neurolabyrinthitis (an inflammation of the nerves of the inner ear). It may have been a side effect of syphilis, one of the most common diseases in Goya’s time, though if it was, it seems strange that he lived on to such a ripe age (eighty-two years) and showed no signs of syphilitic degeneration, let alone general paralysis of the insane. (He did have bouts of paralysis during the first year of his affliction, but these passed of their own accord, without significant treatment.) A further possibility is that Goya was stricken by a bout of meningitis. He hallucinated, copiously. He was, one may surmise, utterly bewildered, and he was extraordinarily lucky that he had a close, rich, and wise friend to look after him in his misery.

  This savior was Sebastián Martínez. In the early 1790s, Martínez was one of the outstanding figures in Cádiz or, for that matter, in the whole business world of Spain. Born in the north-central provinces, he had set up a flourishing business in the export of wines, particularly fine sherries, for which the English had a passion. But what distinguished him from the many other wine exporters in the bustling port city of Cádiz was his enthusiasm for art. He had one of the largest collections amassed by a commoner in Spain, none of it inherited, and most acquired by the exercise of discriminating taste. How much of it was genuine, of course, we are unlikely ever to know. Probably the “Leonardo da Vinci” that the connoisseur Antonio Ponz reported seeing on Martínez’s wall was not a Leonardo; few Leonardos were, in the eighteenth century. But it is likely that the works attributed to Titian, Murillo, Velázquez, Ribera, Rubens, Pompeo Batoni, and others were genuine enough, and certainly the Goyas were. The inventory of Martínez’s paintings ran to 743 items, and what must have been of special additional value to Goya was the enormous collection of prints by all manner of European artists, especially English ones, which ran into the thousands. During his long convalescence Goya was free and welcome to study these at leisure, and with the intimacy that comes from fishing an image from a portfolio or a drawer and holding it in your hands: this must have been his closest contact with a wide range of master prints since his (presumably much more restricted) access to them long before in the teaching studio of Bayeu in Zaragoza. The work of Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth, and even William Blake circulated in print form in Spain, but most of them were probably collected by Martínez on his business trips to England. It is likely that Goya had his first prolonged contact with the conventions of English portraiture, of which he was to make such intelligent use throughout his career, in Martínez’s cabinets d’estampes. And it would be interesting—though now, alas, impossible—to know how intensively Martínez had been collecting the satirical images of the English caricaturists Gillray, Rowlandson, and others, whose brutal, sexually freighted, and scatological imagination sometimes looks so close to Goya’s, if even grosser.

  Goya, Don Sebastián Martínez y Pérez, 1792. Oil on canvas, 93 × 67 cm. Rogers Fund, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (illustration credit 4.26)

  Very little is known of his stay with Martínez in Cádiz. But he did paint his host in 1792, and it is one of the finest of all his portraits. It shows Martínez seated, holding a letter on blue paper that works as a dedicatory cartouche: “Don Sebastián Martínez, from his friend Goya.” The paper is the brightest spot of color in the painting. The rest is low-toned and exquisitely harmonious: the dark and subtly modulated background, the yellow britches with their silver buttons and buckles, the rather sallow but finely modeled face, and, above all, the jacket. This is rendered in thin transparent washes of blue over the brown underpainting, whose net visual effect is a very subdued green. Over this ground Goya chose to lay wavering stripes of a subtle, lighter green, which convey the slight wrinkling of the well-cut cloth on sleeve, lapel, and chest. It is a marvelously discreet image of a man at peace with himself, gazing back at his depictor with calm, slightly hooded eyes. It is so composed in feeling that it hardly seems possible that Goya could have painted it after his collapse; it must belong to the brief period in 1792 between his arrival under Martínez’s roof and the onset of his disease.

  There is no record that Goya’s wife, Josefa, went south to be with him, though this proves nothing; perhaps she did and no one thought it noteworthy that she had. So not even Goya’s near-disastrous illness throws any light on the condition of his marriage. His first task, once Goya was more or less back on his feet, was to convince art circles in Madrid—which, like art circles anywhere else at any time, fed avidly and bitchily on the misfortunes of others—that illness had not damaged his powers as an artist, even though the big tapestry cartoons he had been working on, such as The Wedding (bigger than 8 × 10 feet), had harshly taxed his physical strength. To do this, he would have to take up his relations with the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid and start attending its meetings again. He wanted to show that the illness was, in some measure, a blessing because it had set his work on a new track: less official, more personal, and so open to development in the direction he felt impelled to take. Thus, he would be seen to have risen above the miseries of his illness without having to wait for a big commission. With this in mind, he wrote to Bernardo de Iriarte, the deputy of the academy, in January 1794: “To occupy my imagination, which has been depressed by dwelling on my misfortunes, and to compensate at least in part for some of the considerable expenses I have incurred, I set myself to painting a series of cabinet pictures.” A cabinet picture was, as he did not need to explain, a small portable painting, one which did not use up a lot of wall space, could be moved around at the owner’s whim, and had no architectural function. Such paintings were unofficial; they “depict themes that cannot usually be dealt with in commissioned works, where capricho and invention do not have much of a role to play. I thought of sending them to the academy, since Your Excellency knows the advantages I might expect to derive from submitting my work to the artists’ criticism.”28 Very humble of Goya, who by now would hardly have given an unripe fig for the opinions of Bayeu and the rest. But the news of his illness was all over Madrid, it had undoubtedly reached the court, and Goya needed to prove that it had not diminished his ability to paint. In March 1794 the director of the Royal Tapestry Factory was writing that, according to what he had heard, “Goya finds it absolutely impossible to paint, as a result of serious illness.” Rumors like that could badly harm a career, even one as apparently vigorous as Goya’s.

  WHAT WERE THESE cabinet pictures? A fairly mixed lot, twelve in all, each of them painted on a thin sheet of tinplate. Three were of disasters, melodramatic events of a fairly generic sort: people fleeing from a fire at night, the survivors of a shipwreck struggling to shore, and, recapitulating his big decorative panel for the Osunas, the holdup of a coach by robbers. A fourth, demonstrating the influence Tiepolo had on him, is a scene of strolling players in commedia dell’arte costume. A fifth depicts the interior of a prison, and a sixth the yard of a lunatic asylum. Rather oddly, the minutes of the academy’s meeting on January 5, 1794 refer to these as “various subjects of national pastimes,” as though being whipped by a madhouse guard and cast ashore, half-drowned, on some coastal rocks were common Spanish diversions. However, the remaining six paintings unquestionably were of pastimes, if that is what one may call the noble, ancient, and bloody ritual of tauromachy. They are all bullfight pictures.

  Goya was an aficionado, an enthusiast for the bulls. Whether he got involved beyond watching the fights is unknown. He liked to boast that he had—late in life, he would say that in his young days, with a sword in his hand, he feared nothing and no one—but that is a masculine boast easily made in Spain, especially when too much time has gone by f
or it to be verified. It may seem curious that his tapestry commissions for Carlos III had scarcely included, among their rural and gallant subjects, a bullfight. (The one exception dates from 1780 and is a cartoon, now in the Prado, of a novillada, or nonfatal encounter between a young animal, possibly a heifer, and a novice bullfighter; it seems possible that the young torero, turning toward the viewer, is a nostalgic self-portrait.) But Carlos III despised bullfights, thought they depraved the spectators, and sought to ban them. We can assume Goya had few expectations of selling these images to his king. But there were plenty of aficionados out there who might have bought them. They were not quite Goya’s first bullfight paintings. Somewhere around 1780 he had done a set of paintings of children’s games, one of which (Madrid, Fundación Santa Marca) depicts a mock bullfight, with one boy under a mock wickerwork bull charging at an infant picador who is riding on the shoulders of another boy, the “horse.” Though he never developed this into a tapestry cartoon—Carlos III’s chamberlains would have vetoed it as unsuitable for a royal palace, especially with that vulgar pink bum of the little crying boy who has been knocked over on the ground—it is very much in Goya’s cartoon manner. There was also a taurine subject among the wall decorations he did for the Osunas’s country villa (1786–87), showing the apartado de toros, the selection of bulls before a corrida. But the set of eight paintings on tin that Goya made during his Andalusian convalescence in 1793–94 was the first sustained treatment he had yet given this theme, and of course the works anticipate the physically smaller but much grander, stranger, and more oneiric narrative of the etchings of the Tauromaquia more than twenty years later.

  Goya painted them on metal supports, tin-coated iron sheets, each more or less 16½ × 12½ inches. The sheets were primed with a pinkish-ocher under-painting, which invites the eye to see them as a continuous series: the preparation, struggle, and death of the fighting bull. The first, The Pasture, or Sorting the Bulls (1793), is set in a meadow on the stud ranch where the bulls were raised; a crowd of enthusiasts, restrained by red-coated mounted guards and the vaqueros, or mounted station hands, has assembled on foot and in coaches to observe the drama of selection of likely toros bravos from a herd in the foreground. In Placing the Banderillas (1793), we see a young bull whose mettle is being tested by toreros in a practice ring on the bull farm, a rehearsal for the eventual corrida. The Bull’s Capture (1793) shows one of the animals brought to town, ready to fight. The town is Sevilla, as one can tell from the Torre de Oro in the middle distance, on the bank of the Guadalquivir. It is a feast day, and a small crowd has erected a greasy pole, which children are climbing. In the foreground is a bull tethered by a rope around its horns; dogs are harassing it.

  Now the formal drama of the fight is about to begin. It starts inside the bullring, but there is no unity of place in this little series. Certainly the arena we see is not the one in Sevilla; nor does it belong to Madrid, although some writers have thought so. Indeed, the architecture of the bullring varies slightly from one image to the next; in some, the arches that frame the palcos, or loges, have Ionic capitals, in others they don’t. Goya is at some pains to make the fight seem, as it were, colloquial. In the late eighteenth century the spectators were allowed into the arena—not, as a rule, while the corrida was in progress, but just before the fight. They had to be cleared out before the lidia could properly begin, and in Clearing the Ring (1793), that is taking place: a mass of the public, including a lot of excited small boys, being shepherded back out through the entrance gate by some alguaciles (bailiffs) on horseback. The touch of Goya’s brush, rapid, broken, and flickering, adds to the excitement and anticipation of the scene.

  In Pass with a Cape (1793), we see an event now altogether gone from modern bullfighting, one that probably never played much of a part in the ritual: a torero is fighting a bull in the foreground, while a picador is trying to herd six or seven bulls out of the ring, back through the open gates of the bull pen. What they are doing in the arena while the fight is going on is anyone’s guess: perhaps Goya was just conflating two moments in time. The documentary interest of the scene lies elsewhere, in the torero’s pass. He looks as though his head is on backwards, while everyone else in the picture, the hundreds in the stands as well as the picador and the peón with the rope, has his or hers on the right way. This is because he is leading the bull behind him with the cape, performing what is called the lance de frente por detrás. Today this well-known maneuver is less common than it was around 1900, but back in Goya’s time it was a challenging invention—entailing a moment, one imagines, of pure terror, when the bull is out of sight behind your back and you can only hope and pray that the next thing you feel won’t be the bull’s horn shattering your femur—and because of it we know who the torero in Goya’s painting is. His name was José Delgado, a star of the bullring who fought under the name of Pepe Illo or Hillo. Goya knew him, though not on the same close terms of friendship as existed between the painter and another great torero, Pedro Romero. (Illo and Romero appear in the later Tauromaquia etchings, but only Romero received the compliment of a portrait by Goya, and one of his finest at that. Delgado had written a book on bullfighting, El arte de torear, and in it he mentions this unique pass, which was to some extent his professional trademark—he claims, correctly it seems, to have invented it, “and I have always carried it off with success.” Perhaps he spoke too soon: it was his fate to die on a bull’s horns in the Madrid plaza on May 11, 1801, and Goya was watching from ringside. Delgado’s death caused great commotion and grief among aficionados in Spain and inspired not only a flurry of popular prints but also several images for Goya’s Tauromaquia some fifteen years later—by which time the death-defying bravery of Pepe Illo had become one of the legends of the ring. One of Goya’s prints of the bullfighter’s death, plate E of the Tauromaquia, shows him being flung upside down in the air by the enraged animal, whose left horn has transfixed Delgado through the thigh and lifted him completely off the ground.

  Goya, Pase de capa (Pass with a Cape), 1793. Oil on tinplate, 43 × 31 cm. Private collection. (illustration credit 4.27)

  Goya, Cogida de un picador o La muerte del picador (The Death of the Picador), 1793. Oil on tinplate, 43 × 31 cm. Private collection. (illustration credit 4.28)

  This spectacle of what could happen to a bullfighter who miscalculates is shown in the next painting in the early series, The Death of the Picador (1793). It is quite the most brutal image that Goya, at the age of forty-seven, had yet painted, and one is inclined to think that its ferocity is a sign of his reaction to the onset of his deafness—a very long way, in any case, from the pastoral and sociable pleasures of the tapestry cartoons. Much more fiercely than the mayhem and highway robbery he painted for the Osunas, it announces the long thread of violence and fear that would henceforth run through his work—an important difference being that while his earlier holdup scene was depicted as a crime and an aberration, in The Death of the Picador Goya painted sudden agony and death as a natural, indeed an entertaining, part of the social spectacle: this is the stuff, he insists, that Spaniards (including me, voyeur that I am) pay their pesetas to see. Like it or not, he says, and most people do like it, this is Spain, and you cannot look away without losing some part, maybe only a few molecules but probably more, of your claims to your ser auténtico as a Spaniard.

  The scene is the middle of the arena, and the formal encounter between men and bull has gone hideously wrong. The bull has charged the picador’s horse (it is worth noting that, two centuries ago, the horse was not protected from the horns by the thick mat, a veritable armor of esparto grass, that is used to shield the flanks of the animal today) and smashed it down, tearing open its belly with its horns. On the sand beneath it is a thickly puddled clot of red intestines. Sometimes, if he was lucky and agile, the dismounted picador could scramble to put himself on the other side of the dying horse, but he has failed this time and received a terrible cornada, gored clean through his right thigh and wrenched
helplessly into the air like a bug on a pin, his head and shoulders hanging over the bull’s face as the beast tosses him to and fro. Barring a miracle, he is a dead man already. A horn that pierces the inner thigh, angling upward and exiting from the lower buttock, is almost certain to sever the deep femoral artery, causing a fatal loss of blood that no tourniquet can stem. And if the picador survives that, he will die of an infection caused by the tribes of bacteria the horn has picked up from the guts of the horse. Nevertheless, his companions are doing their best to get him off the horn. Two peones are hauling on the bull’s tail with all their might and main, hoping that the wretched picador will somehow slide forward under the inertia of his own weight, free of the impaling horn. Two other picadors are attacking the bull with their garrochas, or spears, trying to force it to a standstill.

  Goya, El naufragio (The Shipwreck), I793–94. Oil on tinplate, 50 × 32 cm. Private collection. (illustration credit 4.29)

  It was probably inevitable that, after his mental sufferings, Goya’s mind would have been running in a general way on disaster and mayhem. There’s no knowing exactly what the story behind Fire at Night (1793–94) might be—a close-packed, struggling mass of clothed and half-naked bodies in the flickering light of flames: a burning hospital, perhaps? Or maybe just an excuse for painting chaos for its own sake? There is no doubt about the subject of The Shipwreck (1793–94), although nothing about it convinces you that Goya had ever seen, let alone experienced, such a thing. It is more likely that he knew and remembered shipwreck paintings by Joseph Vernet (1714–89), since quite a few collections in Goya’s provincial Spain had examples of Vernet’s breaking rollers, blown spume, fanged rocks, and pathetic gatherings of sodden crew and passengers. Here, a rocky coast is dotted with the survivors of a wreck. They are crawling out of the water in the distance; in the foreground they cover a small headland, some of them obviously surviving, like the bare-bottomed woman on the left being dragged from the waves, and others, like the man sprawled on his back on the unforgiving rocks, obviously not. It is an exercise in the horrible, the terrible, and the awful well suited to Romantic tastes for the sublime, and its climax is of course the unhappy woman in the yellow skirt who stands precariously on the rocky shelf, arms flung to heaven in a gesture of despair and imprecation.