Francisco Goya (1746-1828)

Goya was born in Spain at a time when his country was in the artistic doldrums.

He lived through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Enlightenment — a time when Spain had lost its position as the world’s greatest marine power to England. Napoleon installed his brother as head of Spain.

Revolt occurred. The Church was attacked; it responded with a vengeance. Violence was the norm.

Goya became totally deaf at a young age, a bi-product of tapestry cartooning which carried with it a chemical hazard leading to deafness. Goya from then was secretive, obsessed with his health, fearing blindness. He painted royalty and secretly did prints — disasters of war — a bleak commentary of horror from the French suppression of Spanish uprisings.

Goya could do everything. He painted the Naked Maja 1789-1805 (Prado). The Inquisition forbade nudity. This isn’t a portrayal of nudity with its sense of innocence, this is sheer naked.

Up to this time nudity was introduced in a mythological or religious context. Here the young woman leers at the viewer, no props, no diversions, just sheer commercial lust. Goya was called up before the Inquisition on it. Prime Minister Godoy, a ladies man, had a clothed Maja of the same woman by Goya on a pulley over the naked Maja and depending on the guest, Godoy would pull a certain pulley.

I will focus on The Shootings of May 3rd, 1808 at the Prado in Madrid. There was a popular uprising in Madrid against the invading Napoleonic troops on May 2, 1808. Citizens attacked France’s Moorish Cavalry (also a painting by Goya — Prado). In response, France ordered execution by night.

This is a picture portraying the brutality of modern warfare from the victims’ perspective. The men to be shot have a horrified impotence in the face of the soldiers with rifles, an impersonal, godless, lethal force.

The key figure in the painting has yellow pants and blazing white shirt. His eye the big black corner ringed in white bulges with terror. He throws his arms up and out as though throwing his whole life in extremis in the face of his murderers. The arms portray crucifixion.

Blood beneath, the red of an abattoir.

Most of the victims have faces. Their killers do not. Anonymous killing is born.

The central figure is not idealized nor a martyr sacrificing himself to an idea in the expectation of salvation but a person no longer helped by faith, who has been denied human dignity, abandoned to brutality. The scene does not convey any morality, merely a reality in which morality has lost currency.

There is Saturn Eating Io, his son. The colours striking over a panicked populous (at the top of his arm gobs of bitumen black paint) — black was never like this — Van Dyck’s black is beautiful and subtle — not so here.

Goya’s black paintings in the Prado were originally in his farm outside Madrid filling large rooms. They are images of black grief, without logic, or apparent story line.

In the final analysis this museum is stamped by Goya’s block paintings. Unique. Painted at the end of his career, deaf, isolated, for his house — he surrounded himself with a vista vision of horror and goblins. The Spanish I suppose, like the people in Shakespeare’s time must have believed in spirits, personified by ghosts. The black paintings are slashes, gobs of black, black hats, black faces with white cadmium slashes all in a semi-circle rounded at the top as if in an Italian mirror of heaven, before the profile of a Bull (Anna supposes this may symbolize Spain — who knows but it seems right). They surround it in an arch of huddled terror — terror at the past, the present, suffused in the dark gloom, with the occasional look of suspended belief — but they all KNOW horror is for their bedtime. No real explanation is possible — it is living Hades.

Unlike van Dyck he relies on one shade of black but it is set off by acid lemon yellows, russets, Meissen yellows.

Goya’s paint surface, “so thick, corroded, and mortared; while one admires the daring of its contrasts of tone, the deep chasms of shadow against the glaring highlights that establish the structure of a face, the way a chin or a cheek bone is dragged into being against the surrounding dark by a single oily swipe of a wide, loaded brush.” [Goya, Robert Hughes, Knopf, 2003, p. 380]

One of the panels is called The Witches’ Sabbath (Aquelarre).

There is the devil shaped as a goat with back to the viewer lecturing a group of witches. Their howling faces, images of shriek, venom and full rant. The diatribe molds the angry cauldron of witches into a collective howl.

A mother holds out her squirming baby as an offering to the devil.

This mural prompts my impressions:

‘a huddle of black’

’spider, spider, spider joined together’

‘black hills, streaks of acid yellow
an occasional gash of crimson’

’squat toads, sitting, sliding, crouching, advancing’

‘a fog of evil’

‘a phantasm of morbid’

‘a dream could not be as dark’.

All this is in the Prado — the great gallery of Madrid.

His black paintings in the Prado are so powerful that they eclipse all of Bosch, Velázquez, Van Eyck and Titian in the gallery. There is a room of shimmering El Grecos, as tall as a canvas can be, fluted energy and light but they can’t trump Goya’s sweep and swallow of black, more black, all blackness.