Goya Read online

  Goya, Aquelarre (Witches Sabbath), 1797–98. Oil on canvas, 44 × 31 cm. Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid. (illustration credit 5.5)

  Goya, Escena de brujas (The Spell), 1797–98. Oil on canvas, 44 × 32 cm. Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid. (illustration credit 5.6)

  The Spell is, if anything, more overwrought. It is night again, and a cluster of six witches, five on the ground and one diving down from the sky clattering human thighbones, are menacing a terrified man in a white gown (perhaps a nightshirt, for this may be a dream). One of the hags has a basket of dead babies. Another has a manikin, into which she is sticking a large pin. A third intones spells by the light of a candle, perhaps made—as such candles were meant to be—of human fat. A senior witch in a greeny-yellow gown crouches and leans toward their unhappy victim, stretching out her gnarly hands, with a nasty scowl on her withered mouth. One’s feelings about this scene are roughly like those that are apt to afflict the audience during the first scene of Macbeth: yes, this was probably capable of scaring an eighteenth-century audience, but the power of these “black and midnight hags” with their depressing lack of dentistry has lapsed so far into cliché that it can no longer quite move us, no matter how receptive we would like to be to its spell.

  The exception to this problem, and by far the most beautiful and powerful of Goya’s Osuna witch paintings, is Witches in the Air (1797–98). Three witches, male, are flying in the inky night sky. Each wears a coroza, the tall conical hat (origin of the dunce’s cap) that the Inquisition forced its suspects to wear at trial; but these corozas differ from the ordinary, since they are split at the top and resemble bishop’s miters. Among the three of them, the witches carry another man, at whose flesh they are gobbling like owls. The arms and legs sticking out of the core of bodies make an extraordinary burst of light in the thick darkness. The victim’s mouth is open in anguish, but no one can help him. There are two other “normal” people in the picture, passersby who have seen the moment. They can do nothing because the witches in the air are so palpably real, muscular, bent on their task—there is nothing ghostly about them. The “witnesses” do not want to know what they see and hear. One lies facedown on the earth, covering his ears. The other pulls a sheet over his head and tries to hurry on by, making an apotropaic figa sign with both hands—the thumb stuck between the index and second figures—to ward off evil. Part of the subliminal power of this image for a Spanish Catholic in the late eighteenth century would have been a reminder of a primary Christian image, the Resurrection of Christ, which it morally inverts—the men on the ground, refusing to see a diabolic event, being the equivalent of the sleeping tomb guardians in a Resurrection, who have failed to witness a divine one.

  Goya, Vuelo de brujos (Witches in the Air), 1797–98. Oil on canvas, 43.5 × 30.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 5.7)

  What was Goya’s attitude to the religion of his day and nation? It is a vital, a central question to which there is no certain answer. You could not be a Spaniard without having some relationship to Catholicism. Next to the monarchy, and despite the (as yet) feebly disseminated influences of northern rationalism, it was still the most powerful binding and summoning force in Spanish life: all Spaniards, consciously or not, defined themselves and their beliefs in relation to the Spanish clergy, the hierarchies and dogmas of the Church of Rome. And yet in some respects, despite the reputation Catholicism in Spain had for a relentless authoritarianism, it was quite different from its modern versions. The pope was less of an international tyrant. He was not, for instance, considered infallible when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals. The infallibility of the pope, which now so disfigures the Catholic faith, was not “defined”—the logical absurdity whereby it was infallibly promulgated as infallible, a belief supposedly binding on all Catholics—until the late nineteenth century, long after Goya’s time, in the general agitation that seized a Church faced with the modernist specters of doubt and relativism. Likewise, the complete centralization of doctrinal authority in Rome had not yet developed. Local bishops had much more power, as they had had for centuries since the death of Christ. This did not necessarily mean that Spaniards, including Goya, felt freer about their religious beliefs; only that they could legitimately feel that those beliefs were Spanish, not universal, transcendent, or Roman. They were less likely to experience Spain as a religious colony of Italy.

  Twentieth-century writers, in their desire to emphasize the modernist rebel in Goya, have often made him out to be irreligious, either an agnostic or an enemy of religion. But this is a crude distortion. Goya’s work is full of ferocious satire against the Spanish clergy: greedy, dirty priests, dully tipsy with small vicarious powers, feeding superstitious rubbish to their flocks in order to dominate them. Priests who abuse their authority, including their sexual authority. Just plain priests, in other words, of the low sort. He never for a moment entertained the Big Lie that ordination ennobles. Yet time and again, one is compelled to feel that Goya’s fierce indignation against such men is there because, in betraying the precepts of the Church, the priests have betrayed religion, and that this is the mortal sin that lies behind the more venial ones of lust and gluttony. What Goya hates most, with a cold and unrelenting passion, is hypocrisy. He does not construe the sins of the priesthood as a necessary or inevitable part of religion itself, and there is nothing phony or feigned about the treatment he accords to authentic faith, as in the frescoes of the resurrection of St. Anthony of Padua’s father in the cupola of San Antonio de la Florida. His message is not écrasez l’infâme. But he is forever on the watch for that point at which the impulses of faith, imagined as capable of setting people free, turn into enslaving superstition. Hence, too, his fascination with “black” religion, with witchcraft and sorcery. These, too, are part of the chains that bind men and women to their lesser natures, and their links can be broken only by the act of scrutiny. Looking, for Goya, is also a liberating act, as every effort to see things in their true quality must necessarily be. This made him, by Spanish standards, a most unusual kind of Catholic. But a Catholic he indubitably was—though a Catholic without priests, perhaps even without the custom of going to Mass. There is no record of his doing so, and when he died in Bordeaux, there was no priest summoned to his bedside, no confession, no last Communion.

  MEANWHILE, another figure had entered Goya’s social horizon. Unlike the Osunas, she was not a major patron, but she was to have a great impact on his life, and on his art. It may have been through the Osunas that Goya first met the woman to whom he is indissolubly linked by legend, rumor, and speculation. She belonged to the same level of society and was often a guest in the Osunas’ town and country houses—and they, presumably, in hers.

  She was María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva Álvarez de Toledo, the thirteenth duchess of Alba. She was, without question, one of the most beautiful women in Spain—a fact noted by nearly every man who met and wrote about her. She was tall, slender, with flashing dark eyes and a fine-boned face—perhaps a little too long for modern tastes—surmounted by a mop of thick, dark curls. Her movements were graceful, and she was a superb dancer, with a particular liking for the seguidillas and fandangos that were all the rage in Madrid. She loved maja styles of dress, which contrasted piquantly with her aristocratic bearing. If the word had existed in the eighteenth century, she would have been formidably hip—what else could an aristocratic maja wish to be? Her taste in interior decorating equaled her dress sense: in the 1780s the Palacio de Buenavista, designed by Pedro de Arnal, where the duchess resided with her husband at the corner of calle Alcalá and paseo de Calvo Sotelo, was considered even by its notoriously snobbish French visitors to be a masterpiece of interior decoration. (Alas, it was taken over successively by Manuel Godoy, King José I, and then the Ministry of War, and by the end of the nineteenth century nothing coherent remained of its once spectacularly beautiful Neoclassical décor.)

  The duke was an Anglophile and a music l
over, and this is the character preserved in Goya’s full-length portrait of him from 1793. Its sober colors express the sense of self-restraint and elegant control that this nobleman undoubtedly sought to project in real life: beautifully cut gray-blue britches, a sprigged, high-necked cream waistcoat, a moleskin jacket, and a pair of short boots, which suggest that he has just entered the salon after a turn on horseback. He has no wig and is “in his own hair,” as the expression went. He leans at negligent ease on an inlaid harpsichord in the English style. He holds an open score—a work by Haydn, a great favorite in cultivated English circles.

  Goya, María Teresa Cayetana de Silva, Duchess of Alba, 1795. Oil on canvas, 194 × 130 cm. Colección Casa de Alba, Madrid. (illustration credit 5.8)

  Goya, The Duke of Alba, 1793. Oil on canvas, 195 × 126 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 5.9)

  The duchess’s life was short, if intense. Born in Madrid in June 1762, she died there of a wasting illness, breakbone fever, complicated by tuberculosis, at the age of forty. In the mid-1780s, when Goya must have met her for the first time, she was in the flower of her youth and beauty, and had begun to figure in foreigners’ accounts of their travels in Spain. Thus in 1785 a French traveler named Jean-Marie Fleuriot de Langle gallantly wrote that not a single hair on her head failed to excite sexual desire: “Nothing in the world is as beautiful as she.… When she passes by, everyone leans from their windows, and even children interrupt their games to look at her.”6 Goya felt her sexuality with the uncensorable instinct of a hound getting a scent. That he desired her, with the passionate and rather hopeless possessiveness men in their fifties and sixties can feel for much younger women, there can be little doubt: this much, as we will see, is clear from some of the Caprichos, which are imagined as acts of defamatory revenge against a woman to whose fidelity he has no real claim.

  She, in turn, was flattered by the attentions of the most fashionable artist in Spain. They were friends. But that, in broad outline, is all we know about Goya’s relationship to the duchess of Alba. Despite the acreage of scented embroidery that has been superimposed on their friendship, despite the romantic novelists and the Hollywood scriptwriters—for, inevitably, there was a film about their liaison, The Naked Maja, with the duchess played by Ava Gardner; alas, it was made too early for Cher, who really did look like her when she was young, to take the part—there is no good reason to suppose that the beauty was ever in bed with the deaf genius twice her age. He painted her portrait several times, drew her several times more, and went to stay as her guest on one of the Albas’ country estates, at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, near Cádiz. Because one of these visits took place in 1796, the same year her husband, the duke of Alba, died, it has fueled much speculation. But there is really no way to know what, if anything, Goya and Alba got up to during it. The probable answer is the disappointing one that nothing sexual really happened. Alba was a flirt, and compared with the countess of Osuna, she was rather an airhead—if noblesse oblige imposed on her any of the concerns with education or social justice that the Osunas so strongly felt, there is no record of the fact in her words or anyone else’s. She seems to have read little, and developed few significant friendships with intellectuals. But she was emphatically not a fool, and it would have been distinctly foolish to carry on an affair, even with a deaf and aging houseguest, in front of the numerous and no doubt inquisitive and chatty maids, majordomos, and other servants of the house when her late husband was hardly cold in his tomb. And she was not, as we will see later, Goya’s model for the so-called Naked and Clothed Majas—a pity from the viewpoint of cultural folklore, but also perhaps a relief.

  The first of Goya’s sketchbooks, which he started keeping at around this time, offers no real clues about a possible affair. (Curiously enough, the idea of carrying a bound album of drawing paper and using it for swift jotting of things seen, as a diary almost, had not occurred to other Spanish artists, before Goya. In all, eight of his albums survive, classified by Eleanor Sayre and numbered by her A through H, containing some 550 drawings; this can only be a remnant of the total.) It records what he was looking at in Sanlúcar: mostly women. Where did you go to see naked women in late-eighteenth-century Spain? To the whorehouse, not the drawing room. Album A contains numerous drawings of nudes, single or in pairs, and they are certainly prostitutes hired as models—Cádiz, nearby, was a coastal town, and like all ports it swarmed with buhos, night birds. The fact that some have hairdos like the duchess of Alba’s means nothing, because hookers as well as duchesses wore their hair maja-style, in ringlets. When we see one of them sweeping the floor (drawing “n”) or picking up a chamberpot (drawing “h”), we can be sure that it is not the duchess doing the housework. Drawings have been torn or excised from the album over the years, and perhaps some of them did represent the duchess, but only two survive that certainly do. One shows her standing and arranging her hair; the other is on page “f,” which shows her tenderly holding a little black girl on her lap. This child is María de la Luz, the daughter of an African slave, whom the duchess, who had no natural children of her own, had virtually adopted. This in itself was surely significant, and suggests that whatever “radical” leanings La Alba may have had were not necessarily a mere costume. Aristocrats quite often had black children as a form of décor, as pages or flunkies, but they did not involve themselves in fond relationships with them that betokened a recognition of racial equality, such as this drawing—like others Goya made of Alba and María de la Luz—suggests. The child turns up in other Goyas, too: in one small painting she is seen in cahoots with another mischievous child, a page named Luis de Berganza, tugging on the skirts of the duchess’s dueña, a pious and ancient creature known, for her habit of constantly and ostentatiously praying, as La Beata (the Blessed One). One may see in Goya’s tender records of the freedom and protective affection La Alba bestowed on this child an echo of the idealized Enlightenment sensibility that William Blake wrote of in “The Little Black Boy”:

  My mother bore me in the southern wild,

  And I am black, but O! my soul is white;

  White as an angel is the English child,

  But I am black, as if bereav’d of light.

  La Beata, that much-persecuted old beldam, was also teased by the duchess herself: a painting from 1795 shows the dueña clutching a crucifix and balancing rather precariously on her stick while the duchess, whose face we do not see but who is recognizable by her hair and lissome figure, waves what looks like a twig of red coral in her face. (Why the old woman should be alarmed by the sight of red coral is a mystery, but there it is.)

  Goya, La Beata with Luis de Berganza and María de la Luz, 1795. Oil on canvas, 31 × 25 cm. Private collection. (illustration credit 5.10)

  Goya, The Duchess of Alba and La Beata, 1795. Oil on canvas, 31 × 25 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 5.11)

  It was at about this time that Goya did his two standing portraits of the duchess of Alba. The first, or “White Duchess,” dated 1795, is in the ducal collection of the Alba family at Palacio Liria in Madrid. The second, or “Black Duchess”—she wears a magnificent black lace-trimmed skirt and black mantilla—is dated 1797 and belongs to the Hispanic Society of America, in New York (this page). In both Alba is shown standing, full-length. The “White Duchess” is plainly a public image, or at least one imagined as being seen by the subject’s family and being accepted by others as a historical document of appearance. One cannot be so sure about the “Black Duchess.” She never left Goya’s hands, and is recorded as having been in his studio fifteen years after she was painted. This suggests a powerful private motive, one that is in fact confirmed by the internal evidence of the painting. Janis Tomlinson thinks that “no matter how liberal a patron she might have been, it seems unlikely that she would have accepted a portrait that so mercilessly emphasized her pride and hauteur.”7 But why not? There was never, in the eighteenth century, a shortage of images of aristocrats looking extraord
inarily grand and hoity-toity—for some portraitists, like Pompeo Batoni in Rome, they were a specialty—and there is no reason to suppose that Alba, despite her fondness for woman-of-the-people maja drag, had anything but the highest opinion of herself. But the more compelling reason to suppose that this picture is Goya’s fantasy, not hers, is that she is pointing to the words traced in the sand at her feet: “Sólo Goya” (Only Goya). This is not what she feels, but what Goya hopes: she is in mourning for her dead husband, and Goya is the only man for her. It is the painter’s fantasy, not the subject’s, and presumably that is why the portrait did not pass into the possession of La Alba; she would hardly have wanted visitors to see so striking a declaration of a love that she did not in fact feel. In the painting she is beautiful and imperious, the yellow of her gold-embroidered blouse and the red of her facha, or knotted sash, powerfully suggest the burning coals of passion, glowing through the black filigree of lace. One can imagine the painter staring at it in the privacy of his studio and wishing it were so.

  The “White Duchess” was the one for semi-public consumption. It is a marvelous study in doubling and repetition built around two themes, red and white. The only other color in the portrait is Alba’s mane of black hair, which is painted with an extraordinary and sensuous softness: it cascades down her back, and two thick tendrils caress her shoulders. Her dress is very much in the French manner, not a bit like the maja style of the later portrait; made of gauzy white muslin hemmed with gold embroidery, it is gathered high under her breasts and cinched with a broad crimson sash. The same red is repeated in the bow on her cleavage, in the double row of red coral beads around her throat, in the five-petaled silk bow in her hair, and—not least—in the sweetly parodical red bow her living accessory, a little long-haired creature of the breed known as a bichon frise, bears on its right hind leg. Clearly, Goya had been inspired—though not to the point of servile copying—by English modes of portraiture that he would have seen in reproduction, in the print cabinet of Sebastián Martínez: the lady of quality seen in a landscape with her attendant dog had often been painted by Romney, Gainsborough, and Reynolds. And the fact that the duchess is attired in a flowing white Neoclassical-style robe, probably of Bengal muslin, also attests to Goya’s interest in English Neoclassicism: he is known to have made, during the 1790s, copies after engravings by John Flaxman. Sarah Symmons raises the interesting possibility that Alba’s simple white dress with its red accessories and absence of expensive jewelry was also a kind of radical-chic homage to the fashionable ladies of Paris, who took to dressing themselves in this way to signify purity of republican ideals and the blood of the guillotined Bourbons under the Terror.8 It is, however, unlikely that the duchess herself would have had very pronounced anti-Bourbon or pro-revolutionary feelings, or that Goya would have shared them.