by Will Durant
A swarm of enemies gathered around his books, impugning his patriotism and denouncing his audacities. The Inquisition summoned him before its tribunal, but it could find no explicit heresy in him or his work. In 1742 he resumed his campaign with the first of five volumes entitled Cartas eruditas y curiosas (Learned and Inquiring Letters) . He wrote a good style, recognizing every author’s moral obligation to be clear; and the public so relished his instruction and his courage that fifteen editions of the Teatro and the Cartas were required by 1786. He could not banish superstition from Spain; witches, ghosts, and demons still peopled the air and frightened the mind; but a beginning had been made, and it is to the credit of his order that this had been done by a monk who remained unmolested in his modest cell until his death at eighty-eight (1764).
It was another cleric who wrote the most famous prose work of eighteenth-century Spain. Just as the Benedictines saw that no harm should come to Feijóo, so the Jesuits protected one of their priests whose chief production was a satire of sermons. José Francisco de Isla was himself an eloquent preacher, but he was first amused, then disturbed, by the oratorical tricks, the literary conceits, the histrionics and buffoonery with which some preachers caught the attention and pennies of the people in churches and public squares. In 1758 he made high fun of these evangelists in a novel called Historia del famoso predicador Fray Gerundio. Brother Gerund, said Father Isla,
always began his sermons with some proverb, some pothouse witticism, or some strange fragment which, taken from its context, would seem at first blush to be an inconsequence, a blasphemy, or an impiety, until at last, having kept his audience waiting a moment in wonder, he finished the clause, and came out with an explanation that reduced the whole to a sort of miserable trifling. Thus, preaching one day on the mystery of the Trinity, he began his sermon by saying, “I deny that God exists a Unity in essence and a Trinity in person,” and then stopped short for an instant. The hearers, of course, looked around, … wondering what would be the end of this heretical blasphemy. At length, when the preacher thought he had fairly caught them, he went on: “Thus say the Ebionite, the Marcionite, the Arian, the Manichean, the Socinian; but I prove it against them all from the Scriptures, the Councils, and the Fathers.”83
Within a day of its publication eight hundred copies of Fray Gerundio were sold. The preaching friars assailed it as encouraging disrespect of the clergy. Isla was summoned before the Inquisition, and his book was condemned (1760), but he himself was not punished. Meanwhile he joined his fellow Jesuits in exile, and on the road suffered an attack of paralysis. He spent his declining years at Bologna, living on the pittance allowed him by the Spanish government.
Almost every Spaniard who could write wrote poetry. At a poetic joust in 1727 there were 150 competitors. Jovellanos added poetry and drama to his activities as jurist, educator, and statesman. His home in Madrid became a meeting place for men of letters. He composed satires in the manner of Juvenal, rebuking the corruption he had found in government and law; and, like any city dweller, he sang the joys of rural peace.—Nicolás Fernández de Moratín composed an epic canto on the exploits of Cortez; we are told that this is “the noblest poem of its class produced in Spain during the eighteenth century.”84 The gay and gracious verses of Diego González, an Augustinian friar, were more popular than the didactic Four Ages of Man which he dedicated to Jovellanos.—Don Tomás de Iriarte y Oropesa also indulged a didactic bent in his poem On Music; better were his Fables (1782), which chastised the foibles of pundits and earned him a reputation that still survives. He translated tragedies by Voltaire and comedies by Molière; he made fun of the monks “who hold sway over the heavens and two thirds of Spain”; he was prosecuted by the Inquisition, recanted, and died of syphilis at forty-one (1791).85
In 1780 the Spanish Academy offered an award for an eclogue celebrating pastoral life. Iriarte won second prize and never forgave the victor, for Juan Meléndez Valdés went on to become the leading Spanish poet of the age. Juan wooed Jovellanos, and through him obtained the chair of humanities at Salamanca (1781); there he won first the students, then the faculty, to a more adventurous curriculum, even to reading Locke and Montesquieu. Between classes he wrote a volume of lyrics and pastoral poetry—vivid evocations of natural scenery in verses of such delicacy and finish as Spain had not read for more than a century. The continuing favor of Jovellanos raised Meléndez to the judiciary at Saragossa and to the chancery court at Valladolid, and his poetry suffered from his politics. When Jovellanos was exiled (1798) Meléndez was banished, too. He turned his pen to denouncing the French invaders of Spain, and Joseph Bonaparte especially; but in 1808 he returned to Madrid, accepted office under Joseph Bonaparte, and shocked Spain with poetic flatteries of his foreign masters. In the war of liberation that deposed Joseph the poet’s house was sacked by French soldiers, he himself was attacked by an angry mob, and he fled for his life from Spain. Before crossing the Bidassoa into France he kissed the last spot of Spanish earth (1813). Four years later he died in obscurity and poverty in Montpellier.
Spain should have had good dramatists in this age, for the Bourbon kings were well disposed toward the theater. Three factors made for its decline: the strong preference of Isabella Farnese for opera and of Philip V for Farinelli; the consequent dependence of the theater upon the general public, whose applause went most to farces, miracles, legends, and verbal conceits; and the effort of the more serious dramatists to imprison their plays within the “Aristotelian unities” of action, place, and time. The most popular playwright of the century was Ramón Francisco de la Cruz, who wrote some four hundred little farces satirizing the manners, ideas, and speech of the middle and lower classes, but portraying the sins and follies of the populace with a forgiving sympathy. Jovellanos, the uomo universale of Spain, put his hand to comedy, and won both the audience and the critics with his Delinquente honrado (1773)—The Honored Criminal: a Spanish gentleman, after repeatedly refusing to fight a duel, finally takes up a persistent challenge, kills his opponent in a fair fight, and is condemned to death by a judge who turns out to be his father. Always a reformer, Jovellanos aimed with his play to obtain a mitigation of the law that made dueling a capital crime.
The campaign for the Aristotelian unities was led by the poet Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, and was carried on to success by his son Leandro. The early poems of this youth pleased Jovellanos, who secured a berth for him with the Spanish embassy in Paris. There he made friends with Goldoni, who turned him to writing plays. Fortune lavished gifts upon “Moratín the Younger”; he was sent at public expense to study the theaters in Germany, Italy, and England; and on his return to Spain he was given a sinecure that allowed him time for literary work. His first comedy was offered to a Madrid theater in 1786, but its presentation was delayed for four years while managers and actors debated whether a play obeying the rules of Aristotle and French drama could win a Spanish audience. Its success was moderate. Moratín took the offensive; in his Comedia nueva (1792) he made such fun of the popular comedies that the audience thereafter accepted dramas that studied character and illuminated life. Moratín was acclaimed as the Spanish Molière, and dominated the stage of Madrid until the French invasion of 1808. His French sympathies and liberal politics led him, like Meléndez and Goya, to co-operate with the government of Joseph Bonaparte. When Joseph fell, Moratín narrowly escaped imprisonment. He sought refuge in France, and died in Paris in 1828—the same year in which the self-exiled Goya died in Bordeaux.
VIII. SPANISH ART
What could be expected of it after the ravaging of Spain in the long War of the Spanish Succession? Invading armies pillaged the churches, rifled the tombs, burned the pictures, and stabled their horses in venerated shrines. And after the war a new invasion came; through half a century Spanish art submitted to French or Italian domination; and when, in 1752, the Academy of San Fernando was formed to guide and help young artists, it labored to impress upon them the principles of a neoclassicism com
pletely uncongenial to the Spanish soul.
Baroque struggled violently to preserve itself, and in architecture and sculpture it had its way. It triumphed in the towers that Fernando de Cases y Nova added (1738) to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, and in the north front by Ventura Rodríguez (1764) for that same monument to Spain’s patron St. James. One of the legends dear to the people told how a statue of the Virgin on a pillar in Saragossa had come to life and had spoken to St. James; on that site Spanish piety built the Church of the Virgen del Pilar; and for that church Rodríguez designed the Templete, a chapel of marble and silver to house the Virgin’s image.
Two famous palaces were raised in the reign of Philip V. Near Segovia he bought the grounds and grange of a monastery; he engaged Filippo Iuvara of Turin to erect there the Palace of San Ildefonso (1719 f.); he surrounded the buildings with gardens and twenty-six fountains rivaling those of Versailles. The ensemble took the name of La Granja, and cost the people 45,000,000 crowns. It had hardly been finished when, on Christmas Eve of 1734, fire destroyed the Alcázar, which had been the royal residence in Madrid since the Emperor Charles V. Philip moved to Buen Retiro, where Philip IV had built a palace in 1631; this remained the chief royal seat for thirty years.
To replace the Alcázar Iuvara planned a palacio real— apartments, offices, council rooms, chapel, library, theater, and gardens—which would have surpassed in grandeur any royal residence then known; the model alone contained enough wood to build a house. Before he could begin construction Iuvara died (1736). Isabella Farnese rejected his design as impossibly expensive, and his successor, Giovanni Battista Sacchetti of Turin, raised (1737-64) the royal palace that stands in Madrid today—470 feet long, 470 feet wide, 100 feet high. Here the style of the late Renaissance replaced baroque: the façade was of Doric and Ionic columns, and was crowned by a balustrade pointed with colossal statues of Spain’s early kings. When Napoleon escorted his brother Joseph to reign in this palace he said, as they mounted the superb stairway, “You will be better lodged than I.”86 Charles III moved into this immensity in 1764.
Under French and Italian influences Spanish sculpture lost something of its wooden severity, and dowered its seraphim with laughter and a saint or two with grace. Subjects were nearly always religious, for the Church paid best. So the Archbishop of Toledo spent 200,000 ducats for the Transparente which Narciso Tomé raised (1721) behind the cathedral choir: a complex of marble angels floating on marble clouds; an opening in the ambulatory, making the marble luminous, gave the altar screen its name. The old realism survived in the Christ Scourged87 of Luis Carmona—a figure in wood, horrible with welts and bloody wounds. Lovelier are the statues of Faith, Hope, and Charity which Francisco Vergara the Younger carved for the cathedrals of Cuença (1759); Ceán-Bermúdez, the Vasari of Spain, ranked these among the finest products of Spanish art.
The great name in the Hispanic sculpture of the eighteenth century was Francisco Zarcillo y Alcáraz. His father and teacher, a sculptor in Capua, died when Francisco was twenty, leaving him the main support of a mother, a sister, and six brothers. Too poor to pay for models, Francisco invited passers-by, even beggars, to share his meal and pose for him; so, perhaps, he found the figures for his masterpiece, The Last Supper, now in the Ermita de Jesús in Murcia. With the aid of his sister Inés, who drew and modeled, his brother José, who carved details, and his priest brother Patricio, who colored the figures and the drapes, Francisco in his seventy-four years produced 1,792 statues or statuettes, some with such tasteless devices as an embroidered velvet robe on a figure of Christ, some so moving in their simple piety that Madrid offered him rich commissions to decorate the royal palace. He preferred to remain in his native Murcia, which in 1781 gave him a sumptuous funeral.
Spanish painting in the eighteenth century labored under a double foreign incubus, from which it did not recover until Goya broke all shackles with his impetuous and unprecedented art. First came a French wave, with Jean Ranc, René and Michel-Ange Houasse, and Louis-Michel Vanloo. The last became court painter to Philip V, and painted an immense canvas of the entire royal family, wigs, hoops, and all.88 Then a flock of lively Italians—Vanvitelli, Amigoni, Corrado . . .
Giambattista Tiepolo and his sons reached Madrid in June, 1762. On the ceiling of the throne room in the new royal palace they painted a vast fresco, The Apotheosis of Spain, celebrating the history, power, virtues, piety and provinces of the Spanish monarchy: symbolical mythological figures poised in air, nereids, tritons, zephyrs, winged genii, chubby putti, virtues and vices flying through the luminous void, and Spain herself enthroned amid her possessions, and glorified with all the attributes of good government. On the ceiling of the guardroom Tiepolo represented Aeneas Conducted to the Temple of Immortality by Venus; and on the ceiling of the Queen’s antechamber he portrayed again The Triumph of the Spanish Monarchy. In 1766 Charles commissioned Tiepolo to paint seven altarpieces for the Church of San Pasquale at Aranjuez; one of these, still brilliant in the Prado, used the face of a Spanish beauty to represent The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. The King’s confessor, Padre Joaquín de Electa, condemned the paganism and crudities of Tiepolo’s work as alien to the spirit of Spain. Tiepolo repented, and painted a powerful Deposition from the Cross 89—a meditation on death brightened by angels promising resurrection. These efforts exhausted the old Titan; he died in Madrid in 1770, aged seventy-four. Shortly afterward the Aranjuez altarpieces were removed, and Anton Raphael Mengs was commissioned to replace them.
Mengs had come to Madrid in 1761. He was then thirty-three, strong, confident, masterful. Charles III, who had never felt at ease on Tiepolo’s fluorescent clouds, saw in the enterprising German just the man to organize the artwork for the palace. In 1764 Mengs was made director of the San Fernando Academy, and he ruled Spanish painting during his stays in Spain. He misinterpreted the classic style into a bloodless, lifeless immobility, enraging both old Tiepolo and young Goya. But he fought beneficently to end the extravagance of baroque decoration and the fantasies of rococo imagination. Art, said Mengs, should seek first a “natural style,” by imitating nature faithfully; only then should it aim at the “sublime style” of the Greeks. How was sublimity to be achieved? By eliminating the imperfect and irrelevant; by combining partial perfections, variously found, into ideal forms conceived by a disciplined imagination, shunning all excess.
Mengs began his work by depicting the deities of Olympus on the ceiling of the King’s bedchamber. Similar pictures decorated the bedroom of the Queen. Perhaps perceiving that their Majesties did not quite follow him to Olympus, Mengs produced for the royal oratory an altarpiece, The Nativity of Our Lord and a Descent from the Cross. He worked hard, ate little, grew irritable, lost his health, thought Rome would restore it; Charles gave him a leave of absence, which Mengs extended to four years. In his second Spanish sojourn (1773-77) he added more frescoes to the royal palaces in Madrid and Aranjuez. His health again gave way, and he begged permission to retire to Rome. The good King granted it, and a continuing pension of three thousand crowns per year.
But were there no native artists then painting in Spain? There were many, but our interest, waning with distance and time, has left them in the murky limbo of fading fame. There was Luis Meléndez, who almost equaled Char-din in still lifes (bordegones, fruteras); the Prado has forty of them, the Boston Museum has an appetizing example, but the Louvre outdoes them all with a wonderful self-portrait. And Luis Paret y Alcázar, who rivaled Canaletto in picturing city scenes, as in his Puerta del Sol 90—the main square of Madrid. And Antonio Viladamat, whom Mengs pronounced the finest Spanish painter of the age. And the kindly, surly, devoted Francisco Bayeu y Subías, who won first prize at the Academy in 1758, designed tapestries for Mengs, and became the friend, enemy, and brother-in-law of Goya.
IX. FRANCISCO DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES
1. Growth
Like all Iberian boys, Francisco took the name of a patron saint, then the name of his father, José
Goya, and of his mother, Eugracia Lucientes—lady of grace and light. She was an hidalga, hence the de that Francisco inserted into his name. He was born on March 30, 1746, in Fuentetodos, an Aragon village of 150 souls and no trees—a stony soil, a hot summer, a cold winter, killing many, making the survivors grim and tough.
Francisco dabbled with brushes, and, in his boyhood, painted for the local church a picture of Nuestra Señora del Pilar, patroness of Aragon. In 1760 the family moved to Saragossa; there the father worked as a gilder, and earned enough to send his boy to study art under José Luzán. With him and Juan Ramírez Goya copied Old Masters, imitated Tiepolo’s subtle coloring, and learned enough anatomy to draw forbidden nudes. Story tells of his joining—soon leading—a band of wild youths who defended their parish against another, how in one of the brawls some bravos were killed, and how Francisco, fearing arrest, fled to Madrid.
In December, 1763, he took an examination for admission to the Academy, and failed. Legend describes his riotous life in the capital; we only know that Goya was not in love with laws. He competed again in 1766, and failed. Perhaps these failures were his fortune: he escaped the academic tutelage of Mengs, he studied the work that Tiepolo was doing in Madrid, and he laid the foundations of a unique style pervaded with personality. The legend tells next how he joined a troupe of bullfighters and traveled with them to Rome, at a date unknown. He was always a devotee of toreadors, and once he signed himself “Francisco de los Toros.” “I used to be a bullfighter in my youth,” he wrote in old age to Moratín; “with sword in hand I feared nothing.”91 Perhaps he meant that he had been one of those venturesome lads who fought bulls in the streets. In any case he reached Italy, for in 1770 he won second prize in a competition at the Academy of Fine Arts in Parma. Legend describes him climbing the dome of St. Peter’s, and breaking into a convent to carry off a nun. More likely he was studying the pictures of Magnasco, whose dark coloring, tortured figures, and Inquisition scenes may have moved him more deeply than the calm and classic poses that Mengs had recommended in Spain.