Goya Read online

  Goya, Fray Pedro dispara contra el Maragato (Friar Pedro Shoots El Maragato), 1806. Oil on wood, 29.2 × 38.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. (illustration credit 7.6)

  THUS FOR GOYA’S “unofficial” work at the bridge between the centuries. What came out of his official duties? Portraiture and more portraiture.

  He painted Carlos IV and María Luisa half-length, full-length, and (very much in the tradition of Velázquez) on their respective horses. But by far the greatest work of art made possible by Carlos IV’s patronage (since it, and he, had nothing to do with the creation of the Caprichos) was Goya’s group portrait of the king and his family (1800) (this page), that still dominates its gallery in the Prado. This was almost the last image of any member of the royal family that he would make; he was never to paint Carlos IV or María Luisa again, although he did two further portraits of their eldest son, the prince of Asturias and future Fernando VII. It is an enormous, intricate, and seductive painting, one that has been constantly misunderstood ever since Théophile Gautier referred to it as “a portrait of the owner of the corner grocery store and his wife.” Today, visitors to the Prado gaze on Goya’s version of the queen’s aging, fifty-year-old face and the king’s pop-eyed, plebeian look—so ordinary, so human—and conventionally marvel at how Goya “got away with it.” There is no mystery. Goya “got away” with nothing at all, and did not try to. The idea that he had set out to satirize the patrons he depended on—who, we must implausibly suppose, must have been too dumb to see what he was up to—dies hard, but it is of course the merest nonsense. First of all, satire requires an audience, and Goya’s portrait, hanging in the Royal Palace, had no audience but royalty and the court. Second, there isn’t the slightest evidence in the painting of any satirical intent—which is only to be expected, since if it had contained any detectable barbs, Goya’s career as first painter portraitist would have been finished there and then. And third, Goya, in the summer of 1800 at the royal retreat at Aranjuez, did no fewer than ten preliminary portrait studies for his sitters, all of which would have had to be approved by their subjects before he began work on the big picture. His motives in painting the king and queen were not those that drove his needle while etching the Caprichos. It may even be that Goya made the royal couple look somewhat nobler and more handsome than they did in real life. Only the very naïve would infer hypocrisy from this theory, but it cannot be tested either, since there is no “objective” likeness against which Goya’s effigies can be compared.

  Goya clearly saw this commission as a chance to invite comparison with Diego Velázquez, to show that he could emulate, or at least confidently approach, the standards set by that long-dead master. The clue to this is the fact that, as in earlier works like his portrait of Floridablanca, he included himself in the painting—an homage to Velázquez’s presence in Las meninas, though less prominent. He is in the penumbra of the glittering and regal family, on the left of the painting, working on the big canvas whose stretcher slopes upward to the top lefthand corner. He gazes directly at the viewer, as does Velázquez’s self-portrait at the easel in Las meninas. There is, however, an important difference. The group in Las meninas, Velázquez included, is painted as if seen from the eyeline of Felipe IV and his queen, who have just entered the chamber and whose indistinct but recognizable reflection can be seen in a mirror on the background wall. Goya’s family group, including the artist himself, is painted as though the figures are looking in a mirror themselves: the mirror, as it were, of the viewer’s own eye, facing them. From where he stands in the painting, Goya could have seen only the royal family’s backs. Moreover, the sense of discovery in Las meninas—the infanta, the painter, and the dwarves disclosed to the royal pair as they come in—is absent from The Family of Carlos IV: these royal personages are obviously and intentionally posing for their likenesses to be made. It is not a slice of life, and its figures were not assembled in this way in the same room at the same time.

  Goya, The Family of Carlos IV, 1800. Oil on canvas, 280 × 336 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.7)

  There are thirteen of them, apart from Goya. María Luisa stands at the middle of the painting (a slightly unusual fact in itself, given that kings traditionally preferred to occupy the center of royal portraits) with two of her children. She holds the hand of six-year-old Francisco de Paula, and her other arm protectively encircles the shoulders of the eleven-year-old infanta, María Isabel. To the right of her is Carlos IV; his figure is balanced, on the left, by Crown Prince Fernando, the new prince of Asturias. In his blue suit he looks almost handsome—a very different creature from the slothful, thick-lipped brute whose stumpy figure would appear in Goya’s portraits fifteen years later, surrounded by attributes of kingship, after his restoration as El Deseado, “the Desired One.” To the right of him is Carlos’s sister, looking slightly mad and haunted with her big black blot of an artificial beauty patch; between her and the infanta is an unidentified woman whose face cannot be made out—presumably she is a generic figure who stands in for the bride of the as yet unmarried Fernando. On Carlos’s side of the painting, there is a clutter of nearish relatives, among them the king’s brother, Antonio Pascual; the queen of Portugal; and the prince of Parma. But the central focus of the huge portrait is, as it ought to be, Carlos IV, his wife, and their heirs. By receding with dun-colored tact into the shadows of the background, Goya has emphasized the energy and glitter of symbolic decoration on the royal party: the crinkled light on the five blue-and-white sashes of the Order of Carlos III, the complicated sparkle of embroidery, stars, and sword hilts, the lavish rhyme between the golden arrows in the coiffures of María Luisa and her daughter María Isabel.

  The surface is Goya at his most energetic, a free, spotted, impasted crust of pigment that keeps breaking into light, full of vitality with never a dull touch. Far from being an exercise in satire, this amounts to an excited defense of kingship: not its divinity, to be sure, but what later ages would call its glamour, its ability to bedazzle the commoner and the subject.

  Carlos IV was lucky. Did ever so dim a monarch deserve such virtuoso treatment? One can reasonably see him as an esthete, if in some ways a rough-and-ready one. But about people and their motives, he had next to no judgment at all. He was incurably thick-headed about intrigues, whether political or erotic. One of his few comments to have survived occurred during a conversation at court with his father, when the son ventured his theory that men of high line-age, and especially of royal birth, need never worry about being cuckolded by their wives or betrayed by their mistresses: what woman, he asked, could feel the slightest carnal attraction to a man of inferior rank? Silence, then a sigh from the old king. “¡Carlos, Carlos, qué tonto tú eres! Todas, sí todas, son putas!” (Carlos, Carlos, what a dummy you are! They’re all whores, every one of them!)

  This story has lived on because it was taken quite unjustly for granted that the most flagrant “whore” of all was the highest lady in the land, Carlos IV’s own Italian wife, María Luisa of Parma, who married him in 1765, when he was seventeen and she only fourteen. Nobody has ever claimed that María Luisa was a woman of outstanding moral sanctity, but there is no doubt that a tidal wave of hypocritical accusation and innuendo was dumped on her by her enemies inside and outside the Spanish court, while many historians since have simply echoed her detractors and made her out to be a case of royal nymphomania second only to Messalina. From today’s perspective, this seems absurdly overblown. Was María Luisa’s sexual behavior any more worthy of censure than that of some recent royals—Prince Philip, for instance, or the former duchess of York, or that saint of kitsch sentiment Princess Di? It hardly seems likely. She did take some lovers over the years (as who, married to that stolid hunter, might not?), but they did not sign in at the palace gate, so their episodic presence in her bed is more a matter of conjecture and gossip than of ascertainable fact. They included the notoriously dissolute count of Teba, the count of Lancaster, the canon of Zaragoza
Cathedral, Ramón de Pignatelli, War Minister Antonio Cornel, and a guardsman named Ortiz.

  The most notorious of her liaisons, however—the longest-lasting and in the end the most fraught with consequences, both for María Luisa and for Spain as a whole—was with Manuel de Godoy (1767–1851), who, thanks to royal patronage, became the virtual dictator of the realm. Godoy joined the Royal Bodyguards in 1784, and before long the queen’s eye fell on him. He was tall, slender, and narcissistically handsome. He cut a fine figure on horseback, despite the palace rumor that he had caught the queen’s attention by falling off his horse while on parade. He had deep, sleepy, coal-black eyes and was said to be irresistible to women. The duchess d’Abrantès thought him as vulgar as a coachman. Napoleon compared him to a bull, though he relented later, on St. Helena, and paid tribute to Godoy’s “genius.” Lady Holland thought his look “voluptuous,” though large and coarse. Her husband, England’s ambassador to Madrid, liked him for other reasons and took him quite seriously—as indeed he might. “Godoy’s manner,” Lord Holland wrote, “though somewhat indolent, was graceful and engaging. In spite of his education, which I presume was provincial and not of the best, his language appeared to me elegant, and equally exempt from vulgarity and affectation.… He seemed born for a high station. Without effort he would have passed in any mixed society, for the first man in it.”4

  María Luisa was then in her thirties, and had been married for some twenty years. With disconcerting speed, Godoy was made welcome at the inner councils of the court. Both Carlos and María Luisa grew to like him, then to trust him implicitly, and more and more to leave decisions of state in his hands. He was made prime minister in 1792. Though Godoy was married and had a semiofficial mistress plus who knows how many unofficial ones, it seems unlikely that there was no sexual relationship between him and María Luisa, and few historians have ever doubted that there was some fire in the midst of the prodigious amount of smoke that they created. But beyond rumor, assumption, and gossip, there is no actual evidence that the two were lovers. What one sees, in fact, is the lingering effect of the all-pervasive propaganda spread by Godoy’s enemies, headed up by the Church, the more conservative nobility (for such grandees could stand the idea of a career bureaucrat as court favorite but not a “low” provincial from Estremadura like Godoy), and, above all, the all-consuming malevolence of María Luisa’s frantically jealous and insecure son, the future Fernando VII, who would do and say anything about anyone who seemed to menace his path to the throne. This included blackening his own mother’s name, and paying cartoonists—not highly gifted ones, but malignant enough—to make broadsheet prints with obscene inscriptions satirizing her relations with Godoy, which were handed around in taverns.

  All this hostility fell on Godoy not because he was a tyrant but because he was not reactionary enough. “Instead,” remarks the historian Raymond Carr, “he was a mild progressive who consistently posed as the friend of enlightenment, earning for himself that hatred of priests and monks which contributed to his fall.”5 Much of his correspondence with María Luisa has survived, and was published in the mid-1930s.6 It is disappointingly chaste and unscandalous; “his bond with María Luisa,” says Carr, “seems to have been hypochondriacal rather than sexual in nature.” What’s more, Godoy and the royal couple stayed together right up to the king and queen’s deaths in 1819, a relationship that lasted some four decades. However blinkered Carlos may have been, he was not stone blind, and his trust in Godoy’s total loyalty could hardly have survived the discovery that his favorite and protégé was cuckolding him. But it may have been impossible to convince him of this, anyway. Floridablanca, who detested Godoy, tried in 1792 and got nowhere with the king.

  Godoy started off as an obscure scion of a petty aristocratic family in the provincial north. Like many such marginal figures, he perceived that the army offered the chance of advancement, and joined it, finding his way into the palace bodyguard as a trooper. (This was not as lowly a position as it sounds: royal bodyguard troopers were the equivalent of sublieutenants in the regular Spanish army, and had to be of noble birth besides.) Because his father was a meat merchant, the son became known throughout Spain as el choricero—“the sausage maker.” This may have also referred to Godoy’s phallic prowess. Beyond his sexual self-esteem, which was realistic, he had an inflated opinion of himself as political savant and military genius, and that was less so.

  But was he the moral coward, the corrupt, self-serving charlatan, that his palace enemies and posthumous detractors have made him out to be? That seems at least debatable. In eighteenth-century Spain, the cortejo—the friend, adviser, and semi-official lover of a high-placed married woman—was a recognized, almost an institutional, figure. Such was the role Godoy played in María Luisa’s life, but he infuriated his enemies and critics by playing it to the very limit and translating it into an unheard-of degree of political and financial leverage. Godoy was driven, more by real conviction than by self-interest, to continue the trend toward “enlightened absolutism” that had been set in motion by his patron’s father, Carlos III. He tried very hard to bring about reforms in the Spanish army, but these were blocked by military vested interests. Both the Church and the aristocracy resented his ambition—encouraged by the economic theories of ilustrados like Jovellanos—to prime the stagnant economy of Spain by forcing them to sell off at least some of their enormous and idle land-holdings. He recognized the crying need for educational reform. “For the great mass of people to emerge from their abjection and ignorance,” he observed, “it is not enough that they should know how to read, write, count, calculate, and draw—they have to know how to think.” Standard priestly education could not give them that, and so Godoy was in favor of starting schools run in accordance with the advanced theories of the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi. (In the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Texas, there is a fragment of a painting by Goya evidently commissioned to show schoolchildren the benefits of Pestalozzi’s system.) At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Godoy supported the founding of the Royal Institute for this very purpose in Madrid. Not much is known about it or its success, except that its pupils, when he paid them a visit, would chant in unison:

  Viva, viva, viva,

  Nuestro protector,

  De la infancia padre,

  De la patria honor,

  Y del instituto

  Noble creador.

  (“Viva, viva, viva, our protector; father of our childhood, honor of the country, and noble creator of our institute.”)

  Godoy was no paragon; as his enemies kept stressing, he was greedy and a libertine. But in some respects he was also a better man, and a more genuinely idealistic one, than many of those enemies. One of his most serious concerns, for instance, was promoting the various Societies of Friends of the Nation that had been started by Campomanes, the encouragement of industry in Spain, and in particular the employment of women in useful work. He involved Goya in this, at least peripherally. The king had given Godoy, in his capacity as prime minister, a handsome palace in Madrid, where he did a good deal of official entertaining. It needed extensive repair and redecoration. The vault of its large vestibule, facing a magnificent central staircase that all guests went up and down, featured four lunettes. For these, Godoy arranged to have Goya paint four tondos, not in fresco but in tempera on canvas, allegories of the four chief elements of Enlightenment economic thought as set forth by Campomanes and Jovellanos. Completed in 1804–6, these were Commerce, Agriculture, Science (lost), and Industry.

  Goya, Alegoría de la industria (Allegory of Industry), 1797–1800. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.8)

  The finest of these was the last canvas, Goya’s homage to The Spinners, c. 1657, Velázquez’s large and complex scene of work at the Royal Tapestry Factory. There is, perhaps, a degree of piquancy in the fact that Goya’s models for this improving allegory were probably whores who had been consigned, as reformatory punishment, to the San Fernando wo
rkhouse in Madrid. Goya liked to frequent this workhouse and draw in it, as one can see from several of the sketches in the Madrid Album of 1796–97. “It’s clear that they are being taken off to the San Fernando workhouse,” says one armed guard to another in sheet 82 as two girls, swathed in shawls to hide their faces, shuffle by; and in sheet 84 we see three women, hair close-cropped to facilitate the search for lice, wielding their spindles in one of San Fernando’s rooms. The two women with their spinning wheels in Industry are, presumably, their sisters, and quite handsome ones at that; Goya has given the one on the left, with her ample green-and-gold skirt and her breasts loosely covered by a brightly lit white blouse, the air of a veritable goddess of industry. But she is a melancholy goddess; her thoughtful expression, tinged with sadness, seems to confirm that she is working there for penance’ sake. It is possible that the image of the Fates, one of whom, Clotho, was classically represented as spinning the thread of human life, was in a corner of Goya’s mind when he was doing this picture for Godoy; he was to depict those three weird sisters in years to come, in one of the Black Paintings in the Quinta del Sordo. Be that as it may, the design is beautifully organized, the large circle of the tondo canvas containing a series of other circles and near-circles; the spinner’s round breasts, the spinning wheels, the round bulge of the green skirt, the women’s round faces, and in the background the big semi-arches of the window openings. Anna Reuter points out that Goya lit his figures as though the light falling on them were coming from a real architectural source, the actual lantern in the middle of the vault of the palace’s antechamber.7