Goya Read online

  Catalans, and Aragonese to a lesser degree, have always waxed lyrical over their medieval defiance of kingship. This gave the Aragonese, in Madrid’s eyes, a reputation for being stiff-necked and stubbornly independent, irrespective of their wealth or political rank. It was put to the test several times, perhaps most memorably by the Hapsburg despot Felipe II, who, after a revolt against Madrid in Zaragoza, ordered the beheading of the latter’s obstinate justicia, Juan de Lanuza. (In the end, tempers cooled and the king, advised that it might not be a good idea to execute an official for supporting so ancient a tradition of relative independence as Aragón’s, backed off.)

  Aragón’s feelings of independence were not genetic, of course, but they were a powerful current in the culture, and awareness of them was part of Goya’s inheritance. They must have reinforced his personal stubbornness, his reluctance to be pushed around by teachers and patrons. And they would certainly have been raised in his mind to a heroic level in years to come, during the Spanish War of Independence, when Zaragoza underwent its purgatory by siege from Napoleon’s forces, holding out for months after all hope of relief seemed to be gone, beating off the stronger French forces and thus supplying Goya with a vast confirmation of his pride in his patria chica and one of the chief starting points of his series of etchings the Disasters of War.

  Fuendetodos was (and still is) a hole—poor, bare, isolated, and dry, a pueblo like thousands of others in Spain where peasants scratched a bare living from resentful soil. It had no river. The infrequent rains ran straight off the rocky slopes of the cordillera. The conditions of life there would hardly begin to change until long after World War II. In Goya’s childhood they had been essentially the same for centuries: water from wells, sparse firewood for cooking laboriously gathered from shrubbery left behind in the destruction of local forests, sour wine, straw bedding, tough meat. There were icehouses made by digging holes deep in the stony soil and capping them with stone domes; ice, chopped from winter deposits, would be stored deep inside. Fuendetodos contained, according to the census, 109 people, all farmers and peasants and their families—and, of course, a priest. Naturally a certain amount of folklore has grown up around little Goya in Fuendetodos and Zaragoza, drawing pigs on a wall and catching the eye of a passing priest, the usual baby-Moses-in-the-bulrushes stuff; but there is no evidence for it, and it can be passed over. The house of Goya’s infancy does survive. Like most birthplaces of artists, it reveals very little beyond the fact that Goya’s family had simple furniture (though none of what is there now is original), cooked stews in pots (ditto), looked at religious pictures (ditto), and presumably had cats.

  And yet, once you have seen those hardscrabble landscapes around Fuendetodos, so bare and bleak and sunstruck, with their isolated trees black in the implacable light, you also know where the landscape backgrounds of the Desastres de la guerra and, even more, the Black Paintings of his old age come from. Saltpeter was mined there, and marble and jasper. It is a landscape without softness, lacking even the rudiments of lyrical pleasure: a landscape of deprivation where every stone is a sharp, weighty noun. One should think of Goya walking these hills with his dog and, sometimes, his school friend Zapater, smelling the odor of wild rosemary and thyme that rose from their boots, swearing companionably, alert to the whir of a partridge or the scurry of a startled rabbit. This blond landscape was in his genetic helix, and all his life Goya would love the feeling of masculine pursuits. He liked the macho life. He was good at it, and good company in the field. He was not cut out simply for the drawing room. Because he was not particularly a man of breeding, not really a caballero, the hunt was also his way of connecting with the life of the nobles and royals he would need to serve if he were to get on. You didn’t need to be the Duke of This or That to hit a partridge, or to blaspheme victoriously when a puff of dust flew from its ass and it came pinwheeling down, feathers awry, out of the hard hot blue air.

  Goya’s house was built of stones, and it was tiny: three rooms up, three down, all sparsely furnished. It is hard to imagine being comfortable in it, but it was almost a palace compared with the semi-troglodytic conditions under which most Aragonese peasants then lived. In any case, he did not grow up there. Whatever kept his father in Fuendetodos did not detain the family long; they were soon back in Zaragoza, forty miles and a world away.

  WHAT KIND OF EDUCATION did Goya the schoolboy receive in Zaragoza? The records are very defective, but most historians agree that he went to a church school, the Escuelas Pías de San Antón, which offered free education to the gifted children of the poor. (Many years later, he would do a commemorative altarpiece depicting the founder of the Escuelas Pías, San José de Calasanz, in the act of raising himself from his deathbed to receive Holy Communion. It is one of the most piercing and beautiful images of old age that this great recorder of age and infirmity would ever produce.) One of his fellow pupils at the Escuelas Pías (pious schools), Martín Zapater, became his tight friend and longtime correspondent. Some 131 letters to him from Goya, written over the period 1755 to 1801, survive. Probably the education the school offered was little more than adequate, but that still put it well above most eighteenth-century schools in provincial Spanish towns.

  Goya came out able to read, write, and figure. He had some familiarity—how much one cannot say—with the work of Virgil, and there are traces of Latin in some of his picture titles and letters: for instance, a witchcraft scene in the Caprichos carries the caption “Volaverunt,” Latin for “They will have flown.” But this was also a common idiomatic phrase in Spanish, so Goya’s use of it probably indicates nothing about his knowledge of Latin one way or another.

  He seems to have taken, as one essayist rather harshly put it, no more interest than a carpenter in philosophical or theological matters, and his views on painting—as we shall see—were very down-to-earth: Goya was no theoretician.

  About his education as an artist, however, more is known. No one could claim that Zaragoza was any kind of Mecca for art teachers, but it did have some artists of more than merely local experience. One of these was José Luzán y Martínez (1710–85). In the 1730s Luzán had gone to Naples in the service of the Spanish ambassador there, Pignatelli, count of Fuentes, and trained under the artist Giuseppe Mastroleo. He soon acquired a rather conventional rococo fluency, and was able to set up his own teaching studio in some rooms of the Pignatelli palace on his return to Zaragoza. The connection between him and the Goya family was, at first, simple: José Luzán was a painter, but his father and two brothers were master gilders, and José Goya struck up a close friendship with one of these brothers, Juan Luzán. The upshot was that young Goya found himself apprenticed, at thirteen, to José Luzán. Such youthful, almost childish, apprenticeships were of course the rule rather than the exception throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. Later on, in a curriculum vitae he wrote in the third person, Goya would refer to spending “four years with Luzán, who taught him the rudiments of design and made him copy the best prints he possessed.” No record survives of which prints these were. This copying of prints was much more than a ritual. It was generally the only access a student had, however thirdhand, to works of art of exemplary quality. Naked models were not available in prudish Spain, which had no tradition of the nude. A mere student had no access to the private collections of the rich, and there were no public museums—especially not in a place like Zaragoza. A teacher with a well-stocked print portfolio thus enjoyed an advantage, like an art school with a good slide collection.

  Luzán also trained the artist who was seen as the other promising talent—in most eyes, more promising—of Zaragoza, Francisco Bayeu y Subías (1734–95). In July 1773 Goya would marry Bayeu’s sister Josefa (“Pepa”), an indication of the tight-knit nature of Zaragoza’s little art world. Goya’s poorly documented four years with Luzán takes him down to about 1763. Seventeen years old, he was then eager to enter a wider field and get better teachers, if they could be found.

  Every three years
in Madrid, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando offered bursaries to young applicants who wished to study painting. In 1763, eight contestants including Goya took part, and five scholarships were available. The test was to copy a plaster statue of the god Silenus. Only one entry was judged worthy of a scholarship. Young Goya failed ignominiously. He tried again three years later. This time the test was to do a history painting: The Meeting of the Empress of Constantinople and Alfonso the Wise. The jury did not cast a single vote for Goya.

  However, one of its members was Ramón Bayeu, the young brother of Francisco Bayeu; in a fine gesture of Spanish nepotism, Ramón voted for his brother and thus ensured him the scholarship. Goya had a reputation as a quick-tempered and mettlesome man, but he was too sensible to start flinging accusations around. Given Bayeu’s growing reputation—he was chosen by Mengs to work with him on the frescoes for the Palacio Real in Madrid in 1763, elected to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in 1765, and became Carlos III’s pintor de cámara in 1767, all ahead of his much younger colleague—Goya was wise to refrain from crossing him. The strategy paid off in the long run: Bayeu would become not only a brother-in-law, but an ally in Goya’s dealings with the court.

  It was not lost on Goya that his monarch, Carlos III, loved Italy and tended to judge all cultural events by Italian and French, rather than Spanish, standards. In 1761 he had brought the neoclassical painter Anton Raphael Mengs from Naples to run artistic affairs in his court in Madrid. In 1762 he imported the great, if now aging, muralist Giambattista Tiepolo and his two sons from Italy. Francisco Bayeu had learned his skills in Italy. Spain had produced great artists in the past, but they were all dead, buried with the siglo de oro, the “Golden Century” of Hapsburg power and empire. There was no coherent, or authoritative, school of Spanish painting as such. To succeed with the Bourbon court in Madrid, you had to be either Italian or an Italophile.

  Goya therefore decided to go to Italy, as generations of foreign artists had done since the time of Albrecht Dürer, in the late fifteenth century. In the art of painting, Italy was still “the school of the world,” though its absolute supremacy had been challenged by the growing cultural centrality of France since the time of Louis XIV. Italy contained nearly all the prototypes of classical antiquity, from the Apollo Belvedere to that battered but still mighty block of energy in stone, the Vatican Torso. Its churches, chapels, domes, vaults, and palace walls bore the greatest compendium of frescoes by leading artists—from Giotto to Veronese, Cimabue to Tiepolo—that wealth, patronage, and the desire for religious or political glory had ever brought together within the borders of one country. It was the locus classicus of art theory and articulate taste, of connoisseurship and intelligent patronage. Whatever could be learned about art, Italy could teach. Since Dürer first went to Venice, generations of young foreign artists had gone there, to study, see, absorb, and submit themselves to the extraordinary challenges that an acquaintance with the higher reaches of Italian art could provide. They were also drawn by the superior status that artists, if they were any good, enjoyed in Italy, in contrast to their lesser fate as “mere” craftsmen at home. “Here I am a gentleman,” Dürer wrote to his old friend Willibald Pirckheimer from Venice, in 1506; “at home I am a bum.” A pattern of creative expatriation had been set for Spanish artists by Diego Velázquez, who had gone there at a high level with letters from his king and the Madrid court from 1629 to 1631, and then again from 1649 to 1651; and by Jusepe de Ribera, the prodigiously gifted son of a Valencian cobbler, who spent nearly all his creative life (c. 1611–52) in Rome, Naples, and other parts of Italy. It is true that when Goya arrived there, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the titans of the past were all dead: Titian, Bellini, Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio, and the rest lived on only in their works. But their works were there to be seen, and that was the important thing. Besides, the taste of Carlos III’s court was essentially Italian taste, and the artists the eighteenth-century Bourbon monarchs most admired—Mengs, Tiepolo, Giaquinto, to name only the more prominent ones—were mostly Italians. (Mengs was not, but he had lived there so long that he might as well have been.) Their work was to be seen in quantity in Italy. Naturally, an ambitious young artist needed to pick up tips from it.

  Virtually nothing is known about Goya’s Italian travels: neither his itinerary, nor his acquaintances, nor his means of support, nor—most frustrating of all—what he spent his time looking at. It is usually assumed that he went to Naples as well as to Rome and Milan. Probably he went overland through France rather than to Livorno, to Genoa, or direct to Rome by sea, because that was the cheap way to go. A recently discovered “Italian sketchbook” of Goya’s, which is certainly genuine enough, is nevertheless uninformative about Goya’s early sources.

  The reason that so little is known about his Italian sojourn is simple. Goya is famous now; then, he was very young and utterly obscure. He kept no diary, no letters from this stage of his life survive, and nobody took notice of him. Nor is it certain what he was painting. There are, for instance, two mythological pictures attributed to his time in Rome, both from 1771: a Sacrifice to Vesta (now lost) and a Sacrifice to Pan. The Pan shows a garden glade, with a massively ithyphallic figure of the divinity rising behind a stone altar. A young woman in white holds up to him a shallow golden bowl. Its contents evidently come from an urn that her companion, kneeling at the foot of the altar, has accidentally spilled. It contains a red liquid: not wine, but hymeneal blood, the symbolism being the loss of virginity. But there is no secure reason to suppose that this rather awkwardly drawn and painted image is really by Goya at all. Any one of a number of immature artists doing classical themes in late-eighteenth-century Italy could have produced it, and its style has nothing to securely connect it to Goya, whose own style was not yet formed. Its companion piece, the Vesta (known only from a photograph), bears the signature “Goya” on its altar, but any forger could (and would) have put it there.

  Goya (attributed), Sacrificio a Pan (Sacrifice to Pan), 1771. Oil on canvas, 33 × 24 cm. Private collection. (illustration credit 2.5)

  Of his life in Rome, only a few morsels are known. He stayed with a friend of Mengs’s, a Polish artist named Taddeo Kuntz, who lived from 1770 to 1771 in the Via Trinità del Monte, at the top of the Spanish Steps. Some evidence has turned up that for a time he shared lodgings in Kuntz’s house with the Venetian engraver Giambattista Piranesi,8 who was then engaged in his monumental descriptions of the antiquities of Rome and had some years earlier produced his brilliant and mysterious architectural fantasies, the Imaginary Prisons, or Invenzioni capric[ciosi] di carceri (c. 1749–50). If this was indeed so, it is a most pleasing coincidence that the authors of the two greatest series of engraved capricci in European art, Piranesi and Goya, should have briefly lodged together. Whether they actually did so or not, Goya was later to show the influence of Piranesi, whose massively thick-walled prisons would be reflected in Goya’s madhouse scenes of the 1790s.

  In the absence of facts, Goya’s early biographers made up his Italian life for him: he earned lire as a street acrobat. A Russian diplomat invited him to go to St. Petersburg as a court painter. He climbed up the dome of St. Peter’s to leave the highest graffiti ever scratched there. He fell in love with a beautiful young nun and plotted to abduct her from her convent one dark night. There is no evidence for these romantic stories, any more than there are grounds for the belief that he went to Italy with a troupe of bullfighters. (There is no doubt, however, about his enthusiasm for the corrida itself—dozens of later etchings and paintings will attest to that, and in one note written years later, he would sign himself jokingly “Francisco de los Toros.” It would have been unnatural if he did not have an afición for bullfighting.) The “romantic” picture of young Goya is, however, quite unconvincing. He did not have a lot of dash, although he was a hard, obstinate, and meticulous worker. He was averse to risks, physical or professional. He was in no sense the conventional Spaniard—all cape, sword, a
nd olés—imagined by nineteenth-century writers. And he seems to have had no unrealistic expectations of making a career as a Spanish expatriate in Italy, where there was too much competition. Jusepe de Ribera had brought that off brilliantly in the seventeenth century, and Diego Velázquez could certainly have done it if he had wanted to, but Goya had no such ambitions. He was homesick, perhaps, and he must have reasoned that his chances of a steady success were much wider in Spain—first Zaragoza, then Madrid—than in the Eternal City.

  Before getting ready to return to Zaragoza, he entered another competition, this time in Italy, once more without success. The twenty-five-year-old artist must have reasoned that he needed academic recognition and that kudos earned in Italy were bound to impress the Spanish more than any he might gain at home in Zaragoza. The Academy of Parma had a yearly competition for young artists; this year, 1771, the assigned subject was Hannibal looking down from the Alps on the plains of Italy, which he was soon to conquer. Goya entered a painting, identifying himself in Italianate spelling as “Francesco Goia,” “a Roman and student of signore Francesco Vajeu [Bayeu], court painter to His Catholic Majesty.” This slightly improved provenance did him little good; Goya’s Hannibal did not win, though one of the judges praised the “grandeur” of the hero’s stance. The painting was sent on to Zaragoza, and has since vanished. A lively and somewhat Tiepolesque oil sketch of the same subject is sometimes attributed to Goya, but, as with the Sacrifice to Pan, there is no firm evidence either for or against the claim that Goya painted it.

  Goya had a further motive for wanting to go back to Zaragoza. He was thinking about marriage. The prospective wife was Josefa Bayeu (1743–1812), the sister of his colleagues Francisco and Ramón. Her qualities, her character, what people (including Goya) thought of her, or what she may have said or thought about anything at all—all these are lost to history and to gossip alike. It is thought, or surmised, that a portrait by Goya of an unidentified, thin-lipped, fairly plain-faced woman in her late twenties or early thirties, now in the Prado, represents Josefa Goya.9 If so, no one could call it a document of marital passion. There exists, however, a much later drawing from 1805, indisputably by Goya of Josefa, which shows her in profile, rather worn and coarsened by age and repeated pregnancy. But then, every known Goya self-portrait shows him to have been a fairly ordinary-looking man. Their marriage lasted without incident or scandal for thirty-nine years, and as far as is known, this was the only depiction Josefa’s loving husband ever made of her. No letters, or none that survive, passed between them, perhaps because they were seldom apart, or possibly because she was unable to read and write. If she was interested in his work, she left no record of the fact. If he was unfaithful to her and she found out about it, no trace of that survives either. Some might say it was an ideal marriage, characterized by the self-effacing loyalty and stability with which she ran the Goya household. But it was not ideal; Josefa must have suffered in the extreme, because she was said to have had twenty pregnancies (probably an exaggeration), from which six sons were brought to term and only one, a boy born in 1784 whom they christened Francisco Javier, survived. (Seven of their children were recorded and baptized; the dates of the others are lost, along with the children themselves: Spanish custom required the death of a child to be registered only if he or she had lived past seven years, and infant mortality was as high for commoners as for queens.) As though this tragic cycle of birth and death weren’t enough, Josefa then had to spend the last twenty years of her life, when she was past childbearing, with a deaf husband. The home, Goya once remarked to Zapater, was “a woman’s sepulchre.” He spoke from experience. Or perhaps the phrase was Josefa’s.