Goya Read online

  Goya was an artist wholeheartedly of this world. He seems to have had no metaphysical urges. He could do heaven, but it was rather a chore. The angels he painted on the walls of San Antonio de la Florida, in his great mural cycle of 1798, are gorgeous blondes with gauzy wings first, and messengers of heaven’s grace only second. They would not carry such grace if they were not desirable. For him, it seems, God chose to manifest himself to humankind by creating the episodically vast pleasures of the world.

  Goya was a mighty celebrant of pleasure. You know he loved everything that was sensuous: the smell of an orange or a girl’s armpit; the whiff of tobacco and the aftertaste of wine; the twanging rhythms of a street dance; the play of light on taffeta, watered silk, plain cotton; the afterglow expanding in a summer evening’s sky or the dull gleam of a shotgun’s well-carved walnut butt. You do not need to look far for his images of pleasure; they pervade his work, from the early tapestry designs he did for the Spanish royal family—the majas and majos picnicking and dancing on the green banks of the Manzanares outside Madrid, the children playing toreadors, the excited crowds—right through to the challenging sexuality of The Naked Maja.

  But he was also one of the few great describers of physical pain, outrage, insult to the body. At that, he was as good as Matthias Grünewald, the Master of the Isenheim Altarpiece. It is not at all inevitable that an artist is as good at pain as he is at pleasure. An artist can handle one without convincingly suggesting the other, and many have. Hieronymus Bosch, the fifteenth-century Netherlandish mystic whose paintings were so avidly collected by the gloomy Spanish monarch Felipe II and, enshrined in the royal collections, would in due course exercise such influence on the fascinated Goya, was not—despite the title of his most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights—especially good at depicting the marvels of sensuality. His hells are always genuinely frightening and credible, his heavens scarcely believable at all. Exactly the opposite problem arises with his great Baroque antitype, Peter Paul Rubens. Look at a Rubens Crucifixion, that noble and muscular body hammered with degrading iron spikes to the fatal tree, and you hardly feel there is any death in it: its sheer physical prosperity, that abundance of energy, defies and in some sense defeats the very idea of torment. Rubens’s damned souls are actors, howling their passion to tatters; one does not feel their pain, except as a sort of theological proposition. The rhetoric overwhelms and displaces the reality (if one can speak of “reality” in such a context). But Goya truly was a realist, one of the first and greatest in European art.

  I once had an illusion that I met him. This was after an auto accident in 1999. The impact smashed my body like a toad’s; so much of the skeletal structure on my right side was broken, disjointed, or pulverized that my chances of survival were rated extremely low. The doctors and nurses, at Royal Perth Hospital and later at St. Vincent’s in Sydney, labored immensely to pull me through, but it took nearly seven months’ hospitalization, more than a dozen operations, more pain than I had imagined possible, and, at the outset, some five weeks in a coma in intensive care. The peculiarity of intensive care is that, while those who do not know about it assume that the patient is unconscious, one’s consciousness—though not of one’s immediate surroundings, or of people coming and going—is strangely affected by the drugs, the intubation, the fierce and continuous lights, and one’s own immobility. These give rise to prolonged narrative dreams, or hallucinations, or nightmares. They are far heavier and more enclosing than ordinary sleep-dreams and have the awful character of inescapability; there is nothing outside them, and time is wholly lost in their maze. Much of the time, I dreamed about Goya. He was not the real artist, of course, but a projection of my fears. The book I meant to write on him had hit the wall; I had been blocked for years before the accident.

  In my dream narrative he was young and something of a street tough—a majo, dressed, I later realized, in the bullfighter’s jacket of his 1794–95 self-portrait (frontispiece). He had a gang of friends around him, scornful fellow majos, and they all judged me to be a ridiculous intruder, so far out of his depth as to be a clown. Our encounter took place in the gloomy, cavernous cells of a lunatic asylum or plague hospital—another location familiar from Goya’s paintings. But these rooms, with their dim light and reverberant echoes, were also an airport: the airport, for some unfathomable reason, of Sevilla. (Sevilla plays little part in Goya’s life; he never lived or worked there, although he did a large painting of its patron saints Justa and Rufina for its cathedral.) My one desire, seemingly my single hope, was to get out of there and somehow drag myself onto an Iberia domestic jet that would carry me away from this awful place, where I had no business to be. The stones were old, but the furniture was oppressively cheap and new: Formica tables, weird mazes of slippery plastic curtains, electronic security scanning gates. Goya delighted in making me walk, or rather hobble or crawl, through the scanners, which emitted repeated squeals and buzzes of alarm. Then he and his friends would turn me around and make me go back, cackling with laughter at the efforts of this inglés asqueroso (disgusting Englishman) to do the impossible and free himself. It was impossible because they had attached a bizarre metal framework to my right leg, which prevented me from getting through a door or crawling through one of the tempting gaps in the outer walls of the prison-airport. The framework had the crude heaviness of eighteenth-century rural ironwork, but it was made of highly polished stainless steel and another metal, which I surmised to be titanium. This, at least, had some correspondence with reality. The doctors at Royal Perth had fitted to my right leg, whose tibia, fibula, knee joint, and femur had been all but pulverized by the collision, a therapeutic device called an Isikoff brace. The limb was encircled by rigid plastic rings from which sharp spikes protruded inwards; these were screwed through the flesh into the broken pieces of bone, holding them in a spatially correct anatomical relation to one another so that they could begin the slow process of knitting together. I would have to wear this prosthesis for months. In my dream, or hallucination, it became the contraption for restraint and torment that Goya had applied to me.

  One does not need to be Dr. Freud to recognize the meaning of this bizarre and obsessive vision. I had hoped to “capture” Goya in writing, and he instead imprisoned me. My ignorant enthusiasm had dragged me into a trap from which there was no evident escape. Not only could I not do the job; my subject knew it and found my inability hysterically funny. There was only one way out of this humiliating bind, and that was to crash through. Or so it seemed. Through all the pain and psychic confusion, Goya had assumed such importance in my subjective life that whether I could do him justice in writing or not, I couldn’t give up on him. It was like overcoming writer’s block by blowing up the building in whose corridor it had occurred.

  Why did he seem so urgent? I couldn’t imagine hallucinating in that way about Delacroix or Ingres, whose work I also adore. But many people, myself included, think of Goya as part of our own time, almost as much our contemporary as the equally dead Picasso: a “modern artist.” Goya seems a true hinge figure, the last of what was going and the first of what was to come: the last Old Master and the first Modernist. Now, it’s true that in a strictly existential sense this is an illusion. No person “belongs” to any time other than his own. There are modernist elements in other artists too; it’s just that in Goya they are more vivid, more pronounced than in his contemporaries. There is nothing “modern” about Anton Raphael Mengs, the top dog of painting at the court of Carlos III in Madrid. One could hardly make a case for the modernity of that wonderfully inventive and sprightly painter Giambattista Tiepolo, who just preceded Goya at the Spanish court. But the kind of modernism I mean is not a matter of inventiveness. It has to do with a questioning, irreverent attitude to life; with a persistent skepticism that sees through the official structures of society and does not pay reflexive homage to authority, whether that of church, monarch, or aristocrat; that tends, above all, to take little for granted, and to seek a con
tinuously realistic attitude to its themes and subjects: to be, as Lenin would remark in Zurich many years later and in a very different social context, “as radical as reality itself.”

  You could say, for instance, that Goya was a man of the old world, because he was so clearly fascinated by witchcraft and absorbed by the ancient superstitions that surrounded the Spanish witch cult. These he illustrated again and again, not only in the monumental and fantastically inventive series of satirical prints known as the Caprichos but in a number of his paintings, including the deeply enigmatic Pinturas negras, the Black Paintings, which he made to decorate the walls of his last Spanish home, the Quinta del Sordo, across the river from Madrid. You might say, then, that witchcraft was a continuous presence in Goya’s imaginative life. But was it witchcraft itself that so fascinated him—the practice of enchantment, white and black magic acting upon reality, experienced by Goya as a fact of life in the real world—or was it the peculiarity of the social belief in it, distressing a rationalist artist as a vestige of a world that was better off without such superstitions? Affirmation or denunciation? Or (a third possibility) did he view witchcraft as a later Surrealist might, as a strange and exceedingly curious anachronism that bore witness to an unreformable, atavistic, stubborn, and hence marvelous human irrationality?

  But he was also one of the new world that was coming, whose great and diffuse project the English called Enlightenment, the French éclaircissement, and to which the Spanish attached the name ilustración. This was the rationalizing and skeptical current of thought that had flowed across the Pyrenees and down into Spain. Its fountainhead was the writings of the Englishman John Locke. But its immediate influence on Spanish intellectuals came from France: from Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), from Voltaire, Rousseau, and Denis Diderot’s gigantic Encyclopedia, that summation of eighteenth-century ideas, which appeared sequentially from 1751 to 1772.

  Goya’s friends were ilustrados, men and women of the Enlightenment. He painted their portraits, and those of their wives, children, mistresses. At the same time he painted people who were very much not ilustrados, representatives of the traditional regimes of Church and State, sometimes powerful ones. Goya tended to paint according to commission. There is little sign of ideological or patriotic preference in his choice of subject. Even a partial list of Goya’s clients before the defeat of Napoleon in Spain shows a fairly even distribution of political views between conservative Spaniards, Spanish liberal patriots, and French sympathizers. In the first category, those he painted included the duchess d’Abrantès, Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, the conde de Fernán Núñez, Ignacio Omulryan, and of course Fernando VII. In the second, there were Jovellanos, the actor Isidoro Máiquez, and that fiery defender of Zaragoza, José Palafox. In the third, the priest Juan Antonio Llorente and the conde de Cabarrús—not to mention that fierce ultra and Bonapartist, France’s ambassador to Spain, the young Ferdinand Guillemardet.

  But on balance he was certainly of the ilustrado party, and were there any doubt, it would be dispelled by his graphic works, especially the Caprichos. Most of the Spanish artists who were Goya’s contemporaries—Agustín Esteve, Joaquín Inza, Antonio Carnicero, and others—left no trace of opinions about society and politics in their work. They were craftsmen; they made their likenesses, did the job expected of them, and that was all. Goya was a very different creature; he could see and experience nothing without forming some opinion about it, and this opinion showed in his work, often in terms of the utmost passion. This, too, was part of his modernity, and another reason why he still seems so close to our reach, though we are separated by so much time.

  GOYA’S BEGINNINGS

  ABOUT THIRTY YEARS separate the two paintings that, between them, show the scope of the artist’s career. Although their subject is the same, their mood and meaning, as well as the way in which they are painted, are utterly different. Yet they were painted by the same man: Francisco Goya y Lucientes. We expect an artist to change in thirty years. But to change so much? To remake himself from top to bottom, into so apparently different an artist, and with such compulsive force? Such a change can happen when youth turns to age, and sometimes art historians call it the coming of a “great, late style.” It is radical, but not with the comparatively weak radicalism of youth. Coming as it does after a long life, when there is so little time left, it has a seriousness beyond mere experiment or hypothesis. It says: look at this and look at it hard, because it may be the last you’ll hear from me.

  In each work he was painting the feast day of San Isidro, the patron saint of Madrid, where Goya lived. Each year it falls on May 15, and it is one of the city’s biggest occasions for celebration and jollity. The person it commemorates was, according to legend (or hagiography, to be polite), an eleventh-century laborer who was tilling the soil in the meadows and flats beside the Manzanares, the river that gives Madrid its water, when his hoe struck a “miraculous” fountain in the earth, which thereafter never ceased to flow. Gradually, it became a place of pilgrimage; those who went there sometimes found that their diseases and infirmities were cured by drinking the water from San Isidro’s well. In the sixteenth century a hermitage was built on the spot by Empress Isabel after her Hapsburg husband Charles V (Carlos I of Spain) and their son Felipe drank the water and were cured of their illnesses. The hermitage became a church, which, expanded and remodeled in a neoclassical style in the early eighteenth century, still stands today, looking back across the Manzanares to the city. By the time Goya was born, in 1746, so many madrileños crossed the Segovia bridge each May 15 and converged on the slopes and meadows below the church of San Isidro that the spot had become a combination fairground, picnic ground, and religious gathering place.

  Goya, La pradera de San Isidro (St. Isidro’s Meadow), 1788. Oil on canvas, 44 × 94 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 2.1)

  They would come in their spring finery, the men in tricornes, breeches, and stockings, the women as delicate as butterflies with their parasols to ward off the sunshine, their carriages and barouches well furnished with picnic hampers; bowing and chatting to one another, passing compliments, and each swallowing a pious draft of holy water from the well.

  This was the scene painted by Goya in 1788 in a brisk oil sketch almost small enough to have been done on the spot, en plein air, though it was almost certainly made in his studio from memory and pencil scribbles. Goya was then a man of forty, a late starter, his career scarcely even begun. Forty was not youngish for the time, but it was for Goya, who would defy all actuarial probabilities of the day by living to the age of eighty-two. His picture is happy and festive. The people in it are those he wants to be among, those, you might feel, that he wants to be: the young man in the foreground, for instance, leaning forward on his cane, gazing with happy absorption at the bouquet of women under the elliptical saucer of the white parasol. Goya would like to be their friend, their social equal, their sexual partner. He would like to know the girl in the red jacket and the yellow skirt, who bends forward to fill the glass of a young man who leans forward to receive the drink. Goya’s vision of this feast day of San Isidro is as uncomplicated and without strain as a Renoir boating-party scene. It is all decorum and shared pleasure.

  Goya, Peregrinación a la fuente de San Isidro (The Pilgrimage of St. Isidro), 1821–23. Oil on canvas, 140 × 438 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 2.2)

  In the distance, across the swiftly brushed gleam of the Manzanares, two big buildings look down on the merrymakers. One building has a single dome, the church of San Francisco; to the left of it is the Pardo, one of the various royal palaces in and around Madrid. Before long, Goya hopes, the scene he is painting will become the sketch for a huge full-scale preliminary study, or cartoon (meaning that the design was done on cartone, paper), which will then be woven in wool to mural scale—Goya meant it to be almost twenty-five feet wide—and placed in one of the rooms of the Pardo palace. He expects it to help bring him
fame, and propel him on his trajectory of success, in the course of which he will become the chief court artist, first painter to the king.

  This did not happen in the way Goya hoped and expected. Later in the same year, 1788, the king—Carlos III, the Bourbon monarch of Spain—would die, and the Pardo palace would fall into disuse: no more new paintings and decorative schemes, including tapestries, would be done for it. There would be no full-size cartoon of the happy open-air crowds on San Isidro’s day, and no tapestry based on such a cartoon. But the small sketch would be absorbed eventually into the collections of the great museum of the Prado, where it remains as one of the very few completely unshadowed images of collective social pleasure in Goya’s work.

  The second picture, traditionally titled The Pilgrimage of San Isidro, also hangs in the Prado, in the galleries reserved for what are called Goya’s Pinturas negras, the Black Paintings of his old age. It was painted sometime between 1821 and 1823, when Goya was in his mid-seventies and had only a few years left to live in Spain. (Before long he would leave the land where, except for a brief youthful sojourn in Italy, he had lived all his life, and move across the French border to Bordeaux, where he died at eighty-two in 1828.) A little earlier he had purchased a house outside Madrid, on the far bank of the Manzanares looking back at the city from roughly the same vantage point as the pilgrims to the miraculous spring of San Isidro. This new residence was called the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man’s Farmhouse. It drew its nickname, by mere coincidence, not from Goya himself, who was indeed as deaf as a stone by then and had been for decades, but from the previous owner, a deaf farmer. We have only an imperfect idea of what this two-story place looked like, since it was demolished later in the nineteenth century to make way for a railway siding, which now bears Goya’s name. Goya, however, covered the internal walls with paintings, done in oil directly on the plaster. The Pilgrimage of San Isidro is one of these.