Goya Read online

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 23, Aquellos polbos (“Those specks of dust”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21.5 × 14.8 cm. (illustration credit 6.16)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 24, No hubo remedio (“There was no remedy”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 22 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.17)

  Not all his prison scenes, though, were of victims of the Inquisition. Perhaps nowhere in his graphic work is there a deeper expression of pathos and fellow feeling for the condemned than in Capricho 32, Por que fue sensible (“Because she was impressionable”). It is a portrait of a woman who was condemned to die for conspiring with her younger lover to kill her older husband—the case of María Vicenta, whose trial and execution were among the sensations of Madrid in the early months of 1798. A beautiful woman sits in jail, surrounded by a darkness of such intensity that it seems almost to be gnawing at her, eroding her fragile form. Her body, hands resting on her knees, forms a right triangle, the kind of absolutely stable and elementary composition Goya favored in his graphic work. Her head is bowed, and her expression is of silent, inward distress, a despair without surcease. High up in the cell door is a rectangular spy hole through which she can be observed. A crack of light beneath the ill-fitting door only reinforces the sense of carceral gloom. Unlike every other plate of the Caprichos, this one has no etched lines at all. It is entirely painterly, rendered only in brushstrokes. It is a tour de force of the aquatint medium, and its softness, its almost liquid delicacy, only serves to emphasize the terrible inequality that is its subject: the iron machinery of punishment poised to crush una mujer sensible into the grave.

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 32, Por que fue sensible (“Because she was impressionable), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21.5 × 15.2 cm. (illustration credit 6.18)

  Such pathos cannot be sustained indefinitely, and Goya knew better than to try. He would produce a broad, acidulated humor as a relief from the terrors of power. Thus his ass pictures, a run of six Caprichos (37–42) in which various kinds of learning and creative effort are ridiculed by showing them enacted by donkeys. There was, of course, nothing especially new in this metaphor: people had been insulting others by comparing them with asses and donkeys since time immemorial, and a fairly robust strain of donkey satire had flourished in Spain since the seventeenth century, when Felipe V’s librarian and secretary Gabriel Álvarez de Toledo (1622–1714) penned his burlesque epic Burromaquia (“Battle of the Donkeys”). But Goya’s graphic fierceness gave the idea a particularly nasty and funny edge. He used donkeys to satirize the deplorable state of Spanish education: “Might the pupil know more?” his caption to Capricho 37 (¿Si sabrá más el discípulo?) asks as a donkey foal points with its hoof at a capital A (for asno, naturally) in its donkey-teacher’s spelling book. In Capricho 38, “¡Bravísimo!,” two human bystanders clap enthusiastically as another donkey listens, sitting on its tail and absolutely rapt, to an ape playing the guitar; unfortunately, the ape is as ignorant as the donkey, because it is strumming the side of the guitar that has no strings. The donkey and the monkey take another turn as patron and artist in Capricho 41, Ni más ni menos (“Not more, not less”). Goya’s monkey, recalling the ancient description of art as “the ape of nature,” is painting a portrait of the donkey, which sits up rather grandly to have it done. This image strongly recalls Goya’s first official portrait: the 1783 likeness of Floridablanca, tall and refulgent in his red suit, towering over the exaggeratedly short painter. This is only right and proper, because the donkey has its own social pretensions. In Capricho 39, Asta su abuelo (“Back to his grandfather”), it sits at a table that bears a coat of arms—whose heraldic figure is an ass—and proudly displays an illuminated book of its lineage, a sort of family tree: ass after ass after ass, stretching nobly back, no doubt, to the donkeys of the age of El Cid.

  Goya’s burro also has scientific pretensions. Capricho 40, ¿De qué mal morirá? (“What illness will he die from?”), has the ass in a suit, sitting by the bedside of a dying man and taking his pulse with its hoof. The expression on the animal’s face is delicately hilarious, an absurd mixture of solicitude and puzzlement; it is obvious that the donkey knows nothing and can make no diagnosis, but also that in Goya’s view no human doctor can either; one is as ill-trained and abysmally ignorant as the other. (As we shall see, Goya did make an exception for Eugenio García Arrieta, a doctor who would treat and care for him later, but on the whole his suspicion of Spanish eighteenth-century medicine was fully justified.)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 37, ¿Si sabrá más el discipulo? (“Might the pupil know more?”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21.3 × 15.1 cm. (illustration credit 6.19)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 40, ¿De qué mal morirá? (“What illness will he die from?”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21.3 × 14.8 cm. (illustration credit 6.20)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 42, Tú que no puedes (“You who cannot”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.21)

  The harshest of the donkey Caprichos is undoubtedly plate 42, Tú que no puedes (“You who cannot”). It is the Upside-Down World of earlier French and Flemish satire, the monde à rebours where normal relationships of work and social standing are inverted: two donkeys riding on the backs of men. They do so with an air of ineffable complacency. The donkey on the left even wears a spur with a cruel, star-shaped rowel on its left hind leg to remind us, and the man beneath it, who is master. Nothing recondite here. The men, in the ill-fitting clothes of jornaleros, or day laborers, are the oppressed poor; the donkeys are the rich, whose burden the poor carry. Tú que no puedes is the first half of a familiar Spanish saying: “You who cannot … carry me on your back.” The design refers to the enormous inequalities bred within the law by inequalities of wealth, a subject dwelled on at some length by Jovellanos in his report on Spanish agriculture, the Informe (1795), one of the founding texts of the Spanish Enlightenment. He pointed out how the great burdens of tax and obligatory service to the realm had to be borne by (mainly agricultural) workers, while the upper tenth of society—nobility, priests, and the like—was exempted from them. Taking up Jovellanos’s theme, Goya did not fail to add that the laboring poor were unaware of this—that they accepted it blindly and dumbly as a “natural” part of the social order and could formulate no protest against it—for the eyes of the men in the Capricho are shut; they can see nothing. Dumb as donkeys themselves, stubborn as mules, they acquiesce in their own subjection. Equally, those on top of the social heap are unable to analyze, or see correctly, why they are there or what they should be doing.

  THE AREA OF THE Caprichos most remote from modern experience is, inevitably, the witchcraft plates. We have all suffered from jealousy and sexual obsession; we have known liars and what they can do; we have seduced and been seduced; fooled and been fooled. We have resented the inequalities of class, the grossness of self-indulgence and drunkenness. Some of us have known the terrors and hatreds that arise from religious bigotry and persecution, and although we may not be militantly anti-clerical, there is no doubt that some of us have felt unease or even outrage at the power of organized religion. Some of the time, therefore, and to some of us, the Caprichos are a contemporary document, and our feelings about this great series are not so distant from those that a person looking at them at the dawn of the nineteenth century might have experienced—though it is unlikely that anyone living today would feel the impulse to burn a whole bound edition of them, as John Ruskin, in a fit of moral pyromania that bizarrely paralleled the human burnings of the Inquisition, actually did. (It is an open question whether Goya might not have regarded this act as a compliment.) But one thing seems fairly certain. Few people alive today, if any, find the Caprichos that take witches for their subject even remotely as convincing, or as accessible, as the rest. And the reason for this is obvious: so few people “believe in” witches or witchcraft. Who allows for the possibility that the old woman, a shapeless blot of shadow glimpsed under the tree in some Andalusia
n village, really has malefic powers? Who thinks that her withered chaps are anything but a dental problem caused by the defects of medical care in the época, the long-gone days of Franco? Who thinks she can cause abortions or lay eggs with prophetic designs on them—the crime for which the last old woman burned by the Inquisition met her fate in 1781? Who imagines her stealing babies from their cradles, consorting with owls in the dark of the moon, sucking the penis of a goat (in her younger days), or flying around on a broomstick? The answer—to snip off this string of largely rhetorical questions—is practically no one. Witches are no longer part of our common culture. They belong to Hollywood horror movies, but they no longer have the power to insinuate themselves into the normal dimensions of everyday life. At least, so an educated city dweller might say. This was emphatically not the case in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Spain, when witchcraft was a real issue—either for social and educational reformers, who wanted to banish it from public consciousness as ancient and harmful superstition; or for clergy who saw themselves locked in a perpetual struggle against witches as the devil’s emissaries and playmates; or for ordinary, ignorant Spaniards who carried a belief in witchcraft, like some irradiant isotope, in the very marrow of their cultural bones.

  The fact that fully a quarter of the eighty final plates in the Caprichos represents witches at work and, so to speak, at play does not necessarily mean that Goya was a true believer in witchcraft. But it does imply that he knew very well what power the image of the witch had over the Spanish imagination in his time.

  The reasons for the wide diffusion of this primitive belief were summarized (at about the time Goya was born) by that father of the Spanish ilustrados, the Benedictine monk Benito Feijoo, at the end of the 1720s in the second volume of his Teatro crítico universal. Why, Feijoo asked, did so many Spaniards share a belief in witchcraft; and why did so many more, including people of some education, find themselves fascinated by it? The causes, he argued, boiled down to five.

  The first was the human tendency to recount and write down cosas prodigiosas, “prodigious things,” wonders. Educated men shared in this: it brought them readers. The second was the habit of “often ascribing to diabolic intervention occurrences that occur naturally, or are produced by skill.” Thus, Feijoo points out,

  In the centuries when mathematics was little studied, there was scarcely an outstanding person in this field who was not taken for a magician by the plebs—and sometimes by more than just the ignorant—because of certain admirable things he could bring forth from such sciences.… Everything exceptional passes as divine or diabolic.… In any country, as soon as a man of some special ability, not glimpsed until then, makes an appearance, he is immediately taken for a witch by the vulgar. The country where this most often happens is our Spain.

  The third reason that people found witchcraft donde no la hay, where it didn’t exist, was “the crackpot vanity of people who want to be taken for magicians without being so.” People posed as witches, an activity linked to the desire for respect: “Who would risk giving the smallest offense to a man who is believed to hold power over your life, affairs, and honor?” The fourth reason was simple malevolence: denounce a person as a witch and you can cause him or her endless grief, from social enmity to the fires of the Inquisition. And the fifth and possibly the widest cause was delusion—the person’s belief that he or she really is a witch.

  Sometimes it happens with subjects in whom a lively imagination is combined with a timid heart; when they get frightened and think about some serious crime—especially when the public gets perturbed by it, and justice pays it close attention—it strangely distorts the mind, opening it to fantasies and chimerical images. The horror of the crime and the severity of the punishment throw the animal spirits into such disarray that, from fear of committing the act, imagination takes it as having been committed.… One sees a clear example of this in ultra-scrupulous people who sometimes believe they have committed the very sins that horrify them most: cursing, blasphemy, heresy.

  Feijoo, of course, was writing about the process of self-incrimination through imagined guilt that drove suggestible Spaniards to destroy themselves under Inquisitorial pressure, just as, two centuries later, it would seal the fate of many victims of Stalin’s show trials. This somewhat veiled reference was about as close to an outright denunciation of the Holy Office’s witch trials as Feijoo, an ordained priest, could go.

  In a disguised way, Goya in the Caprichos drew a parallel between witchcraft and the activities of the clergy. He stressed the resemblance between witches and friars in their obedience to the hierarchy of their calling, the younger deferring to the older. In plate 47, Obsequió al maestro (“Homage to the master”), an apparently senior witch looks down with stony disdain at another, who is offering her (or him) the gift of a dead baby; the supplicant’s gesture reminds one of a groveling postulant kissing the cardinal’s ring. “Es muy justo,” runs the Prado text: “This is quite fair, they would be ungrateful disciples who failed to visit their professor, to whom they owe everything they know about their diabolical faculties.” Plate 46, Corrección (“Correction”), shows a group of brujos, male witches, as seminarians, consulting “the great witch who runs the Barahona seminary”—whatever that institution may have been. Of course, Goya could not be too explicit about this: on the other side of any public criticism of clerical practices lay the ever-watchful eye of the Inquisition, which Goya had to be at pains to evade.

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 60, Ensayos (“Trials”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 20.5 × 16.5 cm. (illustration credit 6.22)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 68, ¡Linda maestra! (“Cute teacher!”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.23)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 65, ¿Dónde va mama? (“Where is Mama going?), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21 × 17 cm. (illustration credit 6.24)

  Goya, Los caprichos, plate 69, Sopla (“It’s blowing”), 1796–97. Etching and aquatint, 21 × 15 cm. (illustration credit 6.25)

  Other scenes of witch education are more intimate, one-on-one: in plate 60, Ensayos (“Trials”), a young and fairly voluptuous witch is teaching an older and scrawnier novice to levitate, under the brooding eye of the mighty he-goat Satan and close to a particularly villainous-looking familiar in the shape of a cat. Plate 68, ¡Linda maestra! (“Cute teacher!”), shows an old witch teaching a young, pretty one to fly on that classically folkloric piece of witch transportation, a broomstick. Both it and the accompanying commentary are, of course, rife with sexual suggestion. The broomstick is a penis, escobar (to sweep) means in slang “to fuck,” and so on.

  That Goya (sometimes, at least) finds brujería ridiculous is suggested by Capricho 65, ¿Dónde va mama? (“Where is Mama going?”). A hugely dropsical naked witch is borne teeteringly along by an awkward knot of other diabolical presences, the one at the bottom having an owl’s face as his cache-sexe. At the top of the group, a desperately unbalanced tabby cat clutches a parasol. But if such images are grossly farcical and meant to be, it is hard to get a laugh from Capricho 45, Mucho hay que chupar (“There is a lot to suck”), with its two revolting crones sharing drugs out of a snuffbox while in front of them lies a big basket packed with the little corpses of babies. The most disgusting of the Caprichos also relates to the theme of diabolic child abuse and cannibalism: plate 69, Sopla (“It’s blowing”). What is “blowing” is the anus of a small boy. A tall, wiry old brujo has him by the legs, as though working a bellows, and a copious blast of foul air flies from the boy’s bottom to a brazier, which sets fire to it. Lighting one’s own farts is an ancient and dirty trope, but Goya gives it the sinister meaning of sexual subjection. This pederastic imagery is carried through in a group just behind the brujo, where another celebrant at this unholy orgy is sucking on the hairless willy of a young boy. “Young boys are the object of a thousand obscenities on the part of old, dissipated men,” declares the Ayala text.

  IT IS INEVITABLE
that, across so large a run of images, certain permanent traits of Goya’s style would move into the foreground to be displayed as in a klieg light. Perhaps the most interesting of these—apart from the wonderful observation and recording of human types, which alone would make him the greatest master of “character” of his time—is his relation to Neoclassicism. We do not habitually think of Goya as a Neoclassical artist: his work is too disturbing and disturbed for that, or so we are inclined to imagine. But in truth, the signs of what he shared with men like Piranesi, Jacques-Louis David, the architect John Soane, and even that singular didactic fantasist Étienne-Louis Boullée are written all over the Caprichos. The most obvious of these are the compositional structures he uses, which tend to be very explicit and readily reduced to geometrical formulas—though the way he deploys them is rarely, if, ever, formulaic. He loves the diagonal and constantly uses it as the basis of his groups and figures. He often takes an image hallowed by use in classical art and gives it a severe equilibrium of forms that goes against, and sharpens, its peculiar and almost blasphemous twist in translation—a vivid example being his scene of the abduction of a helpless woman by two faceless villains, one of them possibly a hooded monk, in Capricho 8, ¡Qué se la llevaron! (“They carried her off!”). This figure group is nothing other than the classic pietà militare, the dead or wounded warrior being carried by his companions from the field of battle, which was later adopted by Christian art as an image of the dead Christ being taken down from the cross and carried to burial. Goya enjoyed the contrast between the abstract severity of some compositions and their intense human emotions. Capricho 9, Tántalo (this page), is a case in point, with its pure right-angle meeting of the axis of the girl’s body and the diagonal slope of the pyramid’s side: an abstract and classical quotation (from the angle of its side, the pyramid is that of Cestus, engraved by Piranesi, whose original Goya would have seen in Rome) that consorts strangely with the utter misery on the face of the lamenting man.