Goya Read online

  IN THE YEARS that preceded and followed the Caprichos Goya turned himself into one of the greatest draftsmen in European history. Without that quality, he could never have become the printmaker he was, for etching is one of the most difficult tests of the ability to draw: it is an intolerant medium, unforgiving of small slips, demanding the utmost decisiveness from those who practice it. However, although many of his drawings are first ideas, sketches, and developments for final etchings, they are all independent works of art, and relatively few of them can be connected to the etchings themselves. For Goya, drawing was a constant and independent source of delight, an aid to memory, a record of bizarre, funny, grotesque, and powerful things seen. Its subject was almost always people. Goya could paint and draw landscape beautifully, but that was not his main concern; and although he painted some of the finest of all still lifes, there is not a still-life study among his drawings. You might think that by 1800 or so there were no technical innovations to be made in the art of drawing, but Goya seems to have come up with a small one: he had notebooks made, sketch pads bound up with leaves of paper, so that he could carry them around and make rapid notes on the spot. He wanted immediacy, and the sketchbooks gave it to him.

  We do not know how many of these pocket albums he filled in the course of his long life. There is one dating from his trip to Italy in 1770–71, and then nothing until 1796, when he was fifty; after that, eight identifiable albums survive, and they originally contained some 550 drawings, most of which have since been unbound, dismembered, and scattered through the world’s collections as single sheets. (Much the same thing happened to some of Leonardo da Vinci’s far more copious output of drawings and notes.) Eleanor Sayre, the first to propose a working chronology and thematic grouping for these sheets, proposed calling them “journal-albums,” which is what they really are: eight diaristic groups of things seen, in Sanlúcar, Madrid, and elsewhere. She attached a different letter to each of the eight, from A through H.

  Six of the albums were filled in Spain, and two belong to his last years in Bordeaux. The first of the Spanish ones, Album A, belongs to his stay at the Alba family’s country finca at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, not far from Cádiz, in 1796. There, as a guest of the duchess of Alba, Goya was taking refuge from the strain of his illness, and the drawings in the album—of which only a few survive—are of women: two or three, at the most, of the duchess herself, and others of girls, presumably prostitutes who resembled her, who posed for him in town. The style is always elegant, the touch light, drawn with a brush and diluted ink; none of the fierce moralizing and mockery of later drawings is to be found in these little scenes of feminine intimacy. One, but only one, of the drawings, the lovely image of a girl absorbed in stretching the wrinkles from her stocking (j), will be repeated in the Caprichos: in plate 17, Bien tirada está (“It is well stretched”), where it assumes the extra content of a sexual pun.

  The Sanlúcar sketches are all social-realist records of “things seen” on the street or in the bedroom. Not so in the next sketchbook, Album B, the so-called Madrid Album of 1796–97, where Goya’s more familiar range—satire, allegory, dramatic mockery—becomes apparent, along with the characteristic device he used throughout the Caprichos: written captions that complete and explain the meaning of the visual image. The idea of captioning a drawing must have come from the English caricatures he had studied in Martínez’s house in Cádiz: no Spanish artist had consistently used it before. Often the captions serve satirical ends. A delicious example is #90 in the Madrid Album. Against a background split by a steep diagonal into zones of black and gray (like the edge of the pyramid in his Capricho Tántalo: Goya loved these Neoclassical references), we see a young woman in a white dress, her eyes rolled to heaven in an obvious parody of the saintly expressions used by artists like Murillo. She gazes on the home of the Virgin. Her hands, however, are pointing straight down at a pair of fetters that lock her feet together—and to which an old woman in the background has the key. The young woman cannot open her legs; an intact commodity, her virginity is assured. “Nobia,” says the caption below. “A bride-to-be. Discreet and penitent, she presents herself to her parents in this guise.” To make quite sure we get the absurdity, Goya has sketched her holy, bare little feet rising, as though in saintly levitation, from the earth.

  Goya, Sanlúcar Album, “Young woman pulling up her stocking,” 1796. Brush and India ink, 17 × 10 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 5.15)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 17, Bien tirada está (“It is well stretched”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21.5 × 15.7 cm. (illustration credit 5.16)

  The drawings are not always satirical, but that edge is seldom repressed. An example is #23 from the Madrid Album, a pretty girl dressed for a festive paseo standing in front of a bull, which is separated from her only by a low stone wall. She is in a dancer’s pose, arms flung up, smiling invitingly, as though at the end of a seguidilla. The upward curve of her arms and their inclination to the right exactly mimic the angle and upthrust of the bull’s horns, thereby perhaps repeating the old saying of toreros that “the women gore worse than the bulls.”

  Goya, Madrid Album, 90, Nobia. Discreta y arrepentida a sus padres se presenta en esta forma (“A bride-to-be. Discreet and penitent, she presents herself to her parents in this guise”). Brush and India ink. Private collection. (illustration credit 5.17)

  Goya, Madrid Album, 86, Buen sacerdote, ¿dónde se ha celebrado? (“Good priest, where was it celebrated?”). Brush and India ink. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (illustration credit 5.18)

  Some drawings are full of scatological humor. Madrid Album #86 shows a flustered-looking man struggling to button up his britches after going to stool: “Buen sacerdote, ¿dónde se ha celebrado?” the caption sardonically enquires, “Good priest, where was it celebrated?” The economy with which Goya delivers this corrosive image is marvelous: a line, a stroke, never a hesitation, reminding you of later fin de siècle caricaturists like Phil May. Sometimes he is as funny (though in a dirtier-minded spirit) as Pope in The Rape of the Lock—“Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast / When husbands, or when lapdogs, breathe their last.” In Madrid #91 we see a preposterous commotion around a constipated lapdog: the weeping lady owner, the perplexed husband, the old crone fingering her rosary, a woman with her praying hands uplifted to the sky—all because, as the caption says, “The whole house is in an uproar because the poor little bitch’s bowels haven’t worked all day.” And one of the bawdiest and funniest of his drawings celebrates animal sex: a stallion heatedly mounting a mule, which itself is being ridden on the highway by an unfortunate priest. The stallion has its hooves over the monk’s shoulders and is gripping his hood in its mouth, as though it were the ass’s mane. “This incident,” Goya notes at the foot of the page, “occurred in Aragón when I was a boy, and the monk was very ill-treated by the horse, and so was the she-ass.”

  For Goya, drawing was an instrument of freedom. Only very rarely do you see him practicing poses or expressions from the earlier repertoire of other artists. He knew, better than most painters of his time, that recipes contained no guarantee of success: everything depended on that first coup d’oeil, the first moment of intersection between the real motif and the hovering, undecided nib or brushpoint, and without spontaneity that encounter could well be lost.

  Goya set forth his feelings about the need for spontaneity, which were intense and felt at his very core, in a report he issued to the Academy of San Fernando in 1792, the year his illness struck, at a time when he still had more than three decades of life as a painter to go. “There are no rules in painting,” he declared, in words whose echoes would be heard behind the entire history of the modernism that was to come:

  The tyranny that obliges everyone, as if they were slaves, to study in the same way or to follow the same method is a great impediment to the young who practice this very difficult art, which comes closer to the divine than any other, since it makes known what G
od has created. Even those who have gone furthest in the matter can give few rules about the deep play of understanding that is needed, or say how it came about that they were sometimes more successful in a work executed with less care than in one on which they had spent most time. What a profound and impenetrable mystery is locked up in the imitation of divine nature, without which there is nothing good!

  To imitate “divine nature,” Goya seems on the point of saying (but does not quite say), one must somehow imitate nature’s processes, and from that rises the value of indeterminacy in drawing. This, at a time when official taste in Madrid was still ruled by the corseted taste of Mengs’s classicism! Nature is powerful, insistent, judgmental, writes Goya, but never “faultless” in a way that the academic mind can encompass. This was an assertion of the value and, more than that, the rights of spontaneity as an artistic principle. In Goya’s work, the spontaneity shows most clearly and vigorously in the drawings. They do not have what his sublime opposite, William Blake, called “the hard and wiry line of rectitude.” Goya was perfectly capable of stealing a form or a motif from a strict Neoclassicist like Flaxman, but his drawings never look as if he did. Rather, they exalt the scribble, the puddle, the blot, the smear, the suggestive beauty of the unfinished—and, above all, the primal struggle of light and dark, that flux from which all consciousness of shape is born.

  Laurent Matheron’s early biography of Goya recalls an overheard conversation that, though it may not have been accurate word for word, rings true in all essentials. What the academics wanted and encouraged in their young charges, said Goya in his old age and exile, was the abstraction of “Always lines, never forms.” But, he went on, “where do they find these lines in nature? Personally I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not, planes that advance and planes that recede, relief and depth. My eye never sees outlines or particular features or details. I do not count the hairs in the beard of the man who passes by any more than the buttonholes on his jacket attract my notice. My brush should not see better than I do.”

  And it is Goya’s ability to see that leaves one silent with admiration.

  To see the old lady in sheet 2 of the so-called Black Border Album, the pen-and-wash strokes defining a crone whose dance, sprightly and seemingly eternal as she balances on one leg while clacking her castanets, defies old age and death along with it: “Content with her lot,” says the caption, and what drawing could evoke more joy? To see another old woman tumbling downstairs, her legs waving in the air like a helpless semaphore, her mouth open in a startled О as though frozen by flash photography: how did he isolate that fraction of a second? To see the two fighting men incoherent with rage, grappling, one striving to bite off the other’s nose like a rabid dog that has launched itself on its enemy. To see the peasant, the wretched jornalero, who has cast down his hoe and now stands in a posture of Biblical intensity, his clenched fists raised to an empty heaven and cursing a nonexistent God: “Crying out will get you nowhere,” Goya scribbles below his feet. It is one of the great manifestos of realism, of the insatiable desire for truth. And its complete fulfillment would appear with the Caprichos.

  THE CAPRICHOS

  TO COMPREHEND THE Caprichos, one needs to know how they were made—a combination of regular etching and aquatint—and what these terms mean.

  They were not Goya’s first essays in the medium of print. He had made prints before, most of which were small copies after Velázquez’s paintings in the royal collections of Madrid. These were straightforward etchings. If they had not been by Goya, they would hardly be remembered. They are wholly routine copies of the already much-copied works of a great painter, transposed into a purely tonal medium. Clearly they had some value to Goya as homages to an artist whose works he adored and wished to learn from; they are the means by which he absorbed, by imitation, some of Velázquez’s cultural DNA; but as independent utterances they are of slight interest. The only early print of Goya’s that can fairly be said to possess real and independent life is his large image of a garrotted man clutching, in his death agony, a crucifix (this page).

  An etching is a way of multiplying an image. The etching has no “original”; all impressions made from it are equally “original.” To make an etching, you take a flat metal plate (usually copper, which is soft, easily scratched, and can be highly polished) and cover it with a “ground,” a thin, acid-resistant coating of asphalt, mastic resin, wax, or a mixture of all three. This application can be done with a roller; in Goya’s time it was more usual to form the ground into a little ball, warm the copper slightly so that the ground would melt, and then rub the plate with the ball so that an even film covered it. Next you cover the ground with soot from an oily flame, which makes it black. Then you draw the design on it with a sharp needle, which scratches the blackened ground away and leaves a pattern of bright gold lines of unprotected copper. Now you dip the plate in a “mordant,” such as weakish nitric acid, which reacts with the exposed copper and eats it away, leaving untouched the metal not protected by the ground. The result is a pattern of tiny grooves “bitten” into the copper. Clean off the ground, wipe ink over the plate, wipe it off; the wet ink stays in the bitten grooves. Put the plate in a press, lay damp paper facedown on it, and roll it out under pressure. The force of the press will squeeze the ink out of the grooves in the copper, transferring the design to the paper.

  Etching, one should note, is commonly called a form of intaglio printing; but “intaglio” comes from the Italian tagliare, to cut, and that is exactly what the etcher does not do. The engraver cuts: he uses no acid, but directly scratches and scores the copper plate with his sharp needle, making a groove and throwing up a microscopic burr along the edge of the line. In etching there is no such burr, and this yields a subtly different visual effect.

  The result, the printed sheet, is called a proof. Some parts of it will be too faint, others just right. The parts that need to go darker must be bitten more deeply by submitting them to the acid again, cleaning off, re-inking, and taking another proof. Before that is done, the passages that are right are kept as they are by “stopping-out”—laying more insoluble ground (varnish, usually) on the copper so that no more acid can reach it.

  It sounds simple; it is, in fact, a very skilled and intuitive process, and master printers are almost as rare as master draftsmen. When he did his copies after Velázquez, Goya was not such a printer, and his work would scarcely engage anyone’s interest were they not made by an artist who, though as yet fairly unskilled in his medium, would eventually turn into the Goya we know. But that Goya came into existence, as a printmaker, through another technical refinement in the process: aquatint.

  Until the appearance of aquatint, the only way an artist could vary the tones of his print was by hatching and crosshatching: covering an area with a web or raster of lines that were closely spaced, so that their spacing made the area dark or light. The greatest master of this process was Rembrandt, who raised it to an unparalleled pitch of expressive power. No two etching techniques produce identical results; each has its own character. But there was one effect in particular that needle-etching could not duplicate: that of a flat watercolor wash, a uniform tone composed of tiny grains and speckles rather than lines. It gave a gamut of tones from delicate gray to a rich, velvety black of a density that could not be rivaled by linear etching. This was known as aquatint. Essentially, you do it by dusting the required areas of the copper plate with fine pulverized resin, which, when heated, sticks to the copper. Immersion in an acid bath then produces a uniformly bitten tone, which prints as a continuous soft wash and not an array of lines. In Goya’s time it was a new and little-exploited printing method, at least in Spain, which tended to lag behind other European countries in adopting new techniques. Because of aquatint’s affinities with watercolor, it had been quite popular in England in the 1770s, though the earliest examples of it date from seventeenth-century Holland. It found only one practitioner in Italy, an otherwise obscure minor artist nam
ed Giovanni David, who published an album of his aquatint etchings in 1775. It may be that Goya’s interest in aquatint came from England, whose satirical cartoonists he so admired. But wherever he got it from, and however he learned to use it—a possible candidate as his teacher is Bartolomé Sureda (1769–1840?), a gifted young engineer and polymath who showed him how to do soft-ground etchings—Goya wholly transformed its potential as a medium. He did not, of course, do this on his own. The making of etchings and engravings, as anyone who has been inside a print shop knows, is a highly collaborative business that brings together people of specialized skills that the artist may not himself possess. The collaboration is, indeed, one of the most absorbing and (when it goes well) delightful aspects of printmaking: as the great printmaker Robert Rauschenberg once remarked, it “relieves the egotistical loneliness of the artist.”1 Goya was able to draw on the talents of several highly skilled printmakers. The chief one was a Valencian artist who was probably the best engraver in Spain at the time, grabador de Cámara to the court after 1802, Rafael Esteve y Vilella (1772–1847). Others were Joaquín Ballester (1740–1800), José Ximeno y Carrera (fl. in Madrid from 1781), and Tomás Rocafort.2