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  What Rembrandt did for line etching, Goya and his colleagues did for aquatint, and they did it with one astonishing burst of creativity: a series of eighty prints that Goya entitled Los caprichos. Without aquatint as their medium, they would not have been possible. Those deep, thick, mysterious blacks against which figures appear with such solidity and certainty, and yet with such apparitional strangeness; that darkness in which most detail is lost, so that one’s eye moves into a record of states of mind rather than a description of a “real” world—such effects owe their intensity to the aquatint medium, and might not have been so available to Goya without it.

  What is a capricho? A whim, a fantasy, a play of the imagination, a passing fancy—so say the dictionaries. The word derives from the unpredictable jumping and hopping of a young goat. Goya was by no means the first artist to call his work a capricho. Italian artists had their capricci, French ones their caprices, and generally the word applied to architectural fantasies: Panini’s assemblies of monuments, Hubert Robert’s dramatized Roman ruins, and Piranesi’s imaginary prisons (Goya owned several prints of the last). But sometimes it referred to dreamlike figures, in or out of costume, enacting their lighthearted or mysterious business, as in the capricci of Tiepolo, which Goya knew through Tiepolo’s presence at Carlos III’s court. Goya, however, was the first artist to use the word capricho to denote images that had some critical purpose: a vein, a core, of social commentary. This he made clear with the notes he made on a drawing for what was to be the first of the Caprichos, but whose final etched version got shifted to plate 43: the “Sleep of Reason” image previously discussed, with the unquietly slumbering man at his desk (perhaps Goya himself) beset by the forces of irrationality personified as owls and bats. On the flank of the desk is written “Universal language [Ydioma universal]. Drawn and etched by Francisco de Goya in the year 1797.” Then, below the design, we read in a pencil scribble: “The author dreaming. His only purpose is to root out harmful ideas, commonly believed, and to perpetuate with this work of the Caprichos the soundly based testimony of truth.”

  The dream, of course, was a useful carrier for almost any sort of satire, just as shipwreck followed by the discovery of imagined utopias and dystopias (Lilliput, Brobdingnag) would be for Jonathan Swift: the artist falls asleep, and he is visited by images that are out of his ken or control but have an unlooked-for truth—he is granted the innocence, but the honesty as well, of a medium or visionary. Dreams are supposed to speak truth, and the dreamer cannot be blamed if the truth he speaks in turn is inconvenient, insulting, or obscure. As Tomlinson puts it, “This manner of introducing satire provided the author with a convenient alibi.”3 Apparently, Goya was taking a leaf out of the book of one of the most famous Spanish authors, Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645), who in 1627 published a set of five prose satires using the convention of dreams, in which various sorts of vice and dishonesty are held up to ridicule: The Possessed Bailiff, The Last Judgment, The Dream of Hell, The World from Within, The Dream of Death. Each of the Caprichos was preceded by studies and drawings; often Goya would dampen the drawing that satisfied him and press it down on a polished copper plate, thus transferring the main lineaments of the design to the metal. Though he never used the word sueño, “dream,” in the prints, it is found in many of the titles that he himself wrote on these surviving drawings. Thus the final drawing for Capricho 43 meant, originally, to be the title plate of the whole series, has written on it “Sueño uno,” “Dream number one.” But there was nothing unconscious about his choices of subject or satire in the Caprichos. Instead, he flatly denied that he was trying to irritate or ridicule anyone in particular: these were common follies and errors that he was after, not the deeds of any one person.

  So on February 6, 1799, Goya ran an announcement in the Diario de Madrid that, though long, is worth quoting for the light it throws on Goya’s expectations about his Caprichos.

  The author is convinced that it is as proper for painting to criticize human error and vice as for poetry and prose to do so, although criticism is usually taken to be exclusively the business of literature. He has selected from amongst the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual, those subjects which he feels to be the more suitable material for satire, and which, at the same time, stimulate the artist’s imagination.

  Since most of the subjects depicted in this work are not real, it is not unreasonable to hope that connoisseurs will readily overlook their defects.

  The author has not followed the precedents of any other artist, nor has he been able to copy Nature herself.… He who departs entirely from Nature will surely merit high esteem, since he has to put before the eyes of the public forms and poses which have existed previously in the darkness and confusion of an irrational mind, or one which is beset by uncontrolled passion.

  The public is not so ignorant of the Fine Arts that it needs to be told that the author has intended no satire of the personal defects of any specific individual in any of his compositions. Such specific satire imposes undue limitations on the artist’s talents, and also mistakes the way in which perfection is to be achieved through imitation in art.

  Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together in a single imaginary being circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

  Clearly, Goya was not being entirely frank with this modest and somewhat guarded declaration of intent. “The author has intended no satire of the personal defects of any specific individual”? It’s true, in a restricted sense: no one in the Caprichos has to suffer the caustic personal malice with which Thomas Rowlandson pilloried his invented pedant Dr. Syntax or James Gillray depicted his “Boney,” Napoleon Bonaparte, the first political figure in history to be universally caricatured. Caricature was much freer in England than anywhere else in Europe; satirical printmaking had something of the status of a profession there, largely thanks to William Hogarth’s agitation for the Copyright Act of 1735, which made it harder to sue or otherwise persecute artists for visual defamation.

  In Spain it was otherwise. The artist who personally offended the king or his ministers, who raised the hackles of a powerful nobleman, or who aroused the ire of the Church and thus set the Inquisition on his track had little protection beyond influential friends, if he had any. To the extent that real, living political figures are referred to at all in Goya’s prints, they appear so unlabeled, unnamed, disguised, and otherwise merely hinted at that, two hundred years later, they are unidentifiable. Contemporary explanations of the Caprichos are some help, but they also tend to be muted. The two earliest (both dating from about 1799–1803) are the so-called Ayala text, which once belonged to the dramatist Adelardo López de Ayala, but exists only in a version included in a biography of Goya by the conde de Vinaza in 1887; and a manuscript preserved in the Prado that was once believed to have been written with the approval of Goya himself. Both tend to agree that Goya referred to the sexual life of Queen María Teresa and the career of Godoy—and if there is any specific political event referred to in the Caprichos, it is Godoy’s acquisition of power through his liaison with the queen.

  This would seem to be the subject of Capricho 56, Subir y bajar (“To rise and to fall”). This is a variation on an ancient image, the Wheel of Fortune, in which the progress of man from ambition to success, thence to domination but then down to failure, is traced in the rotation of Fortune’s wheel. What Goya shows is an enormous, goat-footed satyr, perennial symbol of lust, seated on the round globe of the world and kicking up his powerful legs with glee. Like a circus acrobat gripping his smaller partner, he holds a man upright, by the ankles, with no other support, as though exhibiting him as his creation. This man wears a broad but stupid-looking grin of self-satisfaction. He is wearing a military tunic with crossed bandoliers, an order glitters around his ne
ck, a sword hangs from his belt—but for all these marks of dignity and prowess, he has no trousers on. Held erect by the deity of lust—subir y bajar has, unsurprisingly, the secondary meaning in common Spanish of erection followed by detumescence—he flourishes smoking thunderbolts to hurl at his enemies, two of whom are seen toppling into space, dethroned. His hair is on fire, or perhaps it is his brain, boiling with extravagant whims and schemes. He may be a puppet, but he is a dangerous one, even though he will eventually undergo the fate he has meted out to his rivals. Both the commentaries written on the Caprichos by Goya’s contemporaries and all the more recent nineteenth-century texts agree that this figure is none other than Godoy. The Ayala text names him as the “Prince of Peace,” Godoy’s actual title conferred by Carlos IV. Lust, it says, “raised him up by the feet; it filled his head with smoke and wind, and he flings thunderbolts at his rivals.” “Fortune is very unkind to those who court her,” remarks the Prado text. “Smoke is the reward she gives for the toil of the climb, and she punishes him who has risen by casting him down.” In 1797 Godoy, seeking the support of the Spanish left wing against the pressures that bore on him from the Church and the nobility, had formed a government whose senior posts were largely filled with ilustrado intellectuals, with Francisco de Saavedra as minister of finance and Jovellanos as minister of justice. In March 1798, Carlos IV—who was indignant at the failure of Godoy’s diplomatic maneuvering with France—stepped in and fired Godoy in favor of Saavedra and Jovellanos. But Jovellanos’s reforming zeal was so successful in alienating everyone concerned—the king, the queen, the Church, the nobility, and not least Godoy—that the two ilustrados were dismissed in August and replaced by Godoy shortly after. The cast-off figures of Saavedra and Jovellanos are the ones we see tumbling into space in Subir y bajar, though we do not see their faces.

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 56, Subir y bajar (“To rise and to fall”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 22 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.1)

  Such a moment of political comment is not just rare but virtually unique in the Caprichos. In no systematic order, Goya deals with more generalized subjects that have to do with religion, morality, love, marriage, and superstition rather than government. Nearly a quarter of the plates, for instance, represent the doings of witches, a subject of truly obsessional interest to Goya. Rather more, some twenty-five, deal with sexual mores: courtship and betrothal, seduction, prostitution, abduction, rape, and the miseries of love. The Inquisition, the wiles of charlatans and doctors, the pretensions of aristocratic lineage, the behavior of monks and priests: all come under his eye. He does not make up continuous narratives as Hogarth does in The Rake’s Progress. Each design is a single shot. Characters do not recur, but types do: the lecherous old man, the nitwit petimetre, the grasping priest, the beautiful scheming girl who has less enchantment time left than she thinks, the scary yet comic old crone of a witch, the bizarre duende, or hobgoblin. He does not promise punishment to those he satirizes. He does not care about damnation for sin or salvation from it. What interested him, as a good and committed ilustrado (which he was some of the time, if perhaps not all of it), was the appearance of rational Truth: the light of objective and critical understanding, the light of ilustración, which would dispel the goblins and the follies, and get rid once and for all (vain hope for an artist!) of “harmful ideas, commonly believed.”

  One of these ideas, to judge from Goya’s designs, is that women are good and faithful. Another is that men are decent and honorable. A third is that those in power deserve to be, and selflessly exercise their influence for your benefit and mine. All three of these fantasies, on which a society’s official estimate of its own goodness partially relies, are pilloried as shams and delusions. Goya’s peculiar slant, which lends a special power to his work, is that he will not accept (or, at best, accept only with the deepest reservations) the familiar scheme of goodies and baddies, exploiters and unknowing victims. To him, all of Madrid society—for the Caprichos, despite the appearance of a peasant or two, are an urban masquerade, a portrait of life in Spain’s capital, that condenser of social extremes—is linked in a series of agreements or, to put it more bluntly, deals. I grab from you; you grab from me; each of us loses and each gets something. The note is struck right after the title portrait of Goya himself, in plate 2, El sí pronuncian y la mano alargan al primero que llega (“They say yes and give their hand to the first one who comes”). It is a marriage scene, in a huge dark church whose architecture is only faintly implied in the curve of an arch vanishing in the gloom to the right. Eleanor Sayre has shown that Goya got his idea, along with his title, from a satiric poem by Jovellanos, “A Arnesto” (“To Arnesto”), which ferociously attacks the personification of cynicism and frivolity in a fictional member of the Madrid higher classes: a young lady named Alcinda, who has married a rich man just for his money and social standing, just like others who

  Without invoking reason, nor weighing

  In their hearts the merits of the groom

  They say yes and give their hand

  To the first who comes.4

  Goya’s quote from the poem links his idea indissolubly with that of his friend Jovellanos—normally he did not use direct quotations for his titles.

  At first it looks like an ordinary marriage scene, but it is a peculiar one that gets stranger as you look. Clearly, this is a girl of some prominence, celebrity even: a noble, conceivably a princess. Otherwise, what are all those proles, shoving and jostling one another for a good look, doing in the background? Such people are not normally allowed in church during a rich wedding. Their presence at this one suggests a hollowness: they are there to witness a display, not an affirmation of mutual love. Such rituals are as a rule to be taken seriously—but who, then, is the topmost figure in Goya’s pyramid of people moving toward the altar, the face with its broad, contemptuous grin? The girl, the “Alcinda,” is beautifully dressed in a sexy Empire-style gown—one of the many afrancesado fashions that had made its way to Spain—that emphasizes her breasts, as does the bright light falling on them. She wears a mask, not out of deference to any known marital costume, but simply to tell us that she knows what we know: this is a masquerade, a social pantomime. She is young, cute, and desirable, and she has chosen a perfectly repulsive husband, short, buck-toothed, vacuously grinning (his features and expression irresistibly recall, to a modern TV watcher, a character from The Simpsons), and, presumably, as rich as Croesus. He wears an ermine-collared cloak, aping royalty. He goggles at his trophy bride with naïve, unmodulated lust. And, bizarrely enough, having eyes in the back of her head—an ancient expression for astuteness—she gazes back at him via a mask attached to the back of her coiffure. It is the face of a monkey, symbol of cunning and of lust. Her father, on her left, has traded her off to the highest bidder: but Goya would have us know that she is not naïve, and that she will not make her new husband very happy for very long.

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 2, El sí pronuncian y la mano alargan al primero que llega (“They say yes and give their hand to the first one who comes”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 22 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.2)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 14, ¡Qué sacrificio! (“What a sacrifice!”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 20 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.3)

  The financial basis of matrimony, and the injustices it could bring, was a favorite Goyaesque theme. Clearly he is much more on the side of the pretty young girl in plate 14, ¡Que sacrificio! (“What a sacrifice!”), than he was on the corrupt Alcinda’s. Her demureness is not feigned. She is overcome with shame and resignation. These speak from every line of her facial expression and body language, from the averted face with its eyes modestly downcast to the instinctive gesture of her joined hands protecting her sex. Her family behind her, especially the man one presumes to be her father (who is covering his eyes with an expression of anguish at acquiring such a son-in-law), are, to put it mildly, unhappy at the thought of this betrothal—as well they mig
ht be. The figure of the prospective groom is one of Goya’s most lacerating inventions: dwarfish, easily twice her age, hook-nosed and thick-lipped (this time Goya seems to have slid into the anti-Semitism he normally eschewed), hunchbacked, bow-legged, and overdressed to the nines with the frock coat expensively tailored to the lumpish contours of his body. This is a sacrifice indeed.

  Most of Goya’s images of the sexual comedy, however, have to do with prostitution, seduction, and adultery rather than marriage: he has already made his point about betrothal, that it is itself a form of prostitution.

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 5, Tal para qual (“Two of a kind”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 20 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.4)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 7, Ni así la distingue (“Even like this he can’t make her out”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 20 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.5)

  In the adultery scenes, Godoy and the queen make more appearances—at least, so the commentators of Goya’s time thought. For instance, Capricho 5, Tal para qual (“Two of a kind”), which shows a sword-bearing man and a handsome woman in a black mantilla chatting while two shriveled old crones who clearly have seen such things a hundred times before whisper and point in the background, is referred to in the Ayala text simply as “María Luisa y Godoy.” But once again, there is no sign from Goya’s own hand or words that he had chosen such eminent and powerful targets. The woman does not look like María Luisa, nor does the man even faintly resemble Godoy. It is more likely that the subject is a commonplace encounter on the paseo del Prado between a streetwalker and a possible client, as they size one another up. The preliminary drawing in the Prado carries, in Goya’s hand, the note that “The old women laugh themselves sick because they know he hasn’t a penny.”5 Pennilessness was not a fault Godoy could have been accused of. In general, the later interpreters’ too-facile assumption that he and the queen keep turning up as targets of the Caprichos must be off the mark, because Goya was too canny to put his own livelihood, which depended so much on good favor at court, at risk. He was no fool about such things, and he would have known quite well that the queen would have put pressure on other possible clients of Goya’s to ignore the work of such an impertinent commoner, whatever his talents.