It is very big, indeed panoramic—four and a half feet high by fourteen wide—though not as big as the tapestry was projected to have been thirty-three years before. It is also one of the few paintings from the Deaf Man’s House that can be plausibly connected to an actual event, even though Goya did not sign, date, or title it. It may be that some other romería, or pilgrimage, in some other part of Spain where Goya had been—Andalucía, for instance—supplied the inspiration for this picture. But the sight of the Madrid procession was right on Goya’s doorstep, he had seen it year after year, and it is reasonable to suppose that the subject is indeed the veneration of San Isidro. That the painting, along with the others in the Deaf Man’s House, should have survived at all is not far short of miraculous, for in 1873 the property was bought by Baron Frédéric d’Erlanger, a wealthy Frenchman with real-estate interests in Spain. Unlike most of his developer confrères from then to now, d’Erlanger did care about the visual arts and thought that Goya’s murals—bizarre, mostly incomprehensible, and almost illegibly dark—were worth saving.
Their existence had been noted before by Goya’s friend Bernardo de Iriarte, who visited the house in 1868, long after Goya’s death, and saw them on the walls, assigning his own brief titles to them. But it is more than possible that the Black Paintings might have perished through damp, vandalism, and neglect if the Baron d’Erlanger had not arranged to have the painted plaster—which was not true fresco but oil paint, and therefore highly vulnerable to everything that can go wrong with an absorbent, friable plaster surface—lifted from the walls and remounted on canvas. This work began in 1874. In the process, a certain amount of editing and “correction” went on at the hands of the restorer, one Martín Cubells: for instance, early (prerestoration) photos suggest that the horrific main figure in Saturn Devouring His Son had a partly erect penis before Cubells toned it down in the interest of public decency. It seems extraordinary, when you think of it, that a penis (erect or not) could have been considered more offensive to public taste than the spectacle of a cannibal father ripping a long red gobbet of meat off the corpse of his dead child; but who can say that the same fatuous censorship might not be inflicted on it today?
D’Erlanger had the remounted Black Paintings shipped off to Paris to be shown at the Exposition Universelle of 1878. One would like to report that they caused a sensation, but they did not. Journalists who mentioned them at all dismissed them as the work of a Spanish madman, although they were very much admired by some of the Impressionist painters who saw them. Goya was not a famous figure in France, not even then, but cognoscenti like Manet and Delacroix greatly admired him on the basis of his prints, which were becoming quite well known, and the Black Paintings revealed an aspect of Goya even more extreme, imposing, and bizarre than was to be found in his small-scale graphic work. Still, their display in a corridor next to an ethnological exhibition half a century after Goya’s death did not attract much attention, and in 1881 the baron sent the Black Paintings back to Spain, giving them to the Prado.
The new Pilgrimage of San Isidro is the reverse of the old one in every way. It is dark, near-hysterical, and threatening, without the smallest trace of the sweet festive qualities of the old design. The colors are funereal: browns and blacks predominate, with only an occasional trace of white. The painting contains no picnickers, parasols, or pretty girls. What it shows instead is a sluggish snake of thoroughly miserable-looking humanity crawling toward the viewer across an earth as barren as a slag heap. Two or three women are visible, but most of the people in the painting, insofar as their gender can be made out at all in the enveloping gloom, are male. The most clearly distinguishable woman is pushed off to the right, her face in profile, a mask of lamentation. No picnic baskets, glasses, or other props of plein-air enjoyment are to be seen.
As it reaches the picture plane, the serpent of Goya’s human misery rises up and expands like the hood of a cobra, and we see what it is made of: faces, every one of them contorted in a rictus of extreme expression, singing out of key together, some of them (one feels) just howling like dogs or monkeys. Mouths like craters, mere black holes, a visual cacophony of darkness giving vent to itself.
In this mound of humanity, some divisions of class can be seen. A pair of male figures, whose faces are sunk in the gloom, can be identified as middle class by the cylindrical black hats they are wearing. But the spearhead of this human mass is proletarian, or less than that: mendicants and would-be ecstatics in rags, utterly absorbed in a vision that we, as onlookers, cannot identify or share. The guitarist in the foreground is so caught up in his praise song, or raucous cante jondo, or whatever it is, that he seems beyond communication.
This is Goya’s vision of humanity in the mass, in the raw, almost on the point of explosion. It is painted in a way that seems to have no precedent, fiercely and with a broad brush: swipes of ocher and umber, deep holes of black, the forms of nose, cheekbone, forehead, ear, and the sunken eye socket with the dangerous-looking highlight inside it forming themselves, as it were, out of the rough paste of paint.
No earlier artist had conveyed the irrationality of the mob, especially the mob inflamed by a common vision—religious, political, it makes no difference—with such unsentimental power. What is more, the expressive roughness of the paint, the urgency with which it is applied, and the theater of expression on the crowd’s individual faces—angry, stupefied, cunning, close to madness—amount to an assault on silence. Which they collectively are. They have the ferocity of creatures trying to make themselves heard from the other side of a sealed glass. They are the creatures of Goya’s own deafness. They jostle at the surface of the painting, but the artist cannot hear them and never will. Hence the violence of his representation, the caricatural will to make audible what will always be silent to him.
SAY THE WORDS “Spanish art,” and four names at once leap to most minds: Velázquez, Goya, Dalí, and Picasso, with Doménikos Theotokópoulos, a.k.a. El Greco, a Greek artist who worked in Toledo, a close fifth.
For many people, El Greco is too pious and mannered to be wholly satisfying, while Picasso is too difficult to comprehend as a whole: his most popular works, from his Blue Period, are still his weakest, sentimental and derivative, while his greatest achievement, the co-invention of Cubism, remains too obscure to win an unrigged vote. The colossal popularity of Picasso flows from his protean energy and unquestionable genius. But it also represents the triumph of publicity over accessibility, of curiosity about the man over real love of his work. Much the same is true about Dalí: a genius at publicity but ultimately a self-destructive one, an artist of extraordinary power in his youth—for nothing can ever diminish the marvelous poetry of his work in the 1920s and his film collaborations with Luis Buñuel—but a catastrophically self-repeating bore in his old age.
By contrast, Velázquez has next to no personal myth. We know so little about him that he almost vanishes behind his paintings—not at all an unhealthy situation in an age obsessed and blinded by “personality” and celebrity, but one that makes him difficult for people raised on late-twentieth-century ideas of artistic achievement to approach. What was he “really” like? We do not know and never will. No diaries, no letters, no self-disclosure: a seamless, expressionless, and polished mask that gives us virtually no grip on the paintings he made.
The most accessible of the four, it seems, is Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828). But even there, or perhaps especially there, one needs to be careful. It may be a cliché, but it is nonetheless true, that no great artist surrenders easily to the prying eye, and that none is altogether likely to be self-explanatory. On the one hand, much of Goya’s art has a revolutionary character. On the other, Goyas that are not a bit satirical or hostile have been credited with subversive intent, and much of his work consists of portraits that, fairly seen, are not in the least derogatory of those who commissioned them. The idea of Goya as an artist naturally “agin’ the system” is pretty much a modernist myth. But it is based
on a fundamental truth of his character: he was a man of great and at times heroic independence, who never betrayed his deep impulses or told a pictorial lie. One of the abiding mysteries of Goya seems to be that so fiery a spirit, so impetuous and sardonic, so unbridled in his imagination, could ever have adapted not just occasionally but consistently, for more than forty years, to the conditions of working for the successive Bourbon courts.
But perhaps it is not so mysterious after all. The first biography and study written about Goya appeared well after his death, and were written by Frenchmen: Laurent Matheron’s Goya (Paris, 1858) and Charles Yriarte’s Goya: Sa biographie, les fresques, les toiles, les tapisseries, les eaux-fortes…(Paris, 1867). These authors, neither of whom had known Goya personally, admired him and his work so intensely that they felt obliged to make a French romantic hero out of him: that is to say, a revolutionary, an anti-monarchist, a turbulent and erotic figure with a wild youth behind him and a fiercely ingrained resistance to any sort of interference with his artistic autonomy.
There was, in fact, some basis to their claims, though they were not entirely trustworthy. The reality was, as the early-twentieth-century scholar Enrique Lafuente Ferrari put it somewhat cautiously, that Goya “viviera muy agitados años juveniles.”1 The stories of fiery temperament intersected with another aspect of the Goya legend that was also part truth and part exaggeration: that he was not learned, not well educated in any formal sense—a sort of brilliant primitive risen from the working class. “Deprived of a literary education in his earliest years,” wrote Matheron, “he scarcely opened a book during the formation of his intellectual faculties, which were absorbed by other matters.”
In his zeal to claim Goya for the radical party and make him into a sub-Pyrenean Frenchman, Charles Yriarte went even further, declaring that Goya was “an encyclopedist,” one of the “great demolishers” of Spanish orthodoxy, respecting “neither family nor throne, nor the God of his fathers.”2
This was wildly exaggerated, but it lies at the root of the once commonplace idea that Goya had somehow managed to install himself at the Spanish court as an underminer of the dignity of the Bourbons. It is a durable fancy because it fits the perennial belief in the subversiveness of art, but it is quite untrue. His portraits of the Bourbons and their attendant nobles were not, as twentieth-century writers have often argued, acts of hostility or satire. Even when he was painting someone he had reason to dislike, such as the last king he served, Fernando VII, he was able to do it, if not with flattery, at least with a reasonable degree of equanimity. Goya the indignant ironist, the protester against death and injustice, mainly appears in his graphic work, which, though publicly (and unsuccessfully) offered for sale during the artist’s lifetime, did not come into being through any act of royal or noble patronage. The closest King Carlos IV came to active involvement in the Caprichos was not in underwriting their creation; it was in permitting Goya to sell him the original copperplates after the publication had failed, in return for a royal pension granted to his son Javier.
Except for Pablo Picasso, no Western artist in the last 150 years seems to have so dominated the culture of his country during his own lifetime as Goya. Yet, curiously enough, this is a retrospective illusion, caused by the simple fact that, to our eyes, he was by far the best painter in Madrid in the 1790s. His position was never entirely secure at court and had little grip on the public’s imagination. Admittedly, what counted in those days was not public opinion, simply because the “general public” did not buy or commission paintings—only a small elite was interested or had the money. But in matters of art, in late-eighteenth-century Madrid, there was no cozy question of democratic consensus on quality. This meant that a newcomer had to be careful what he imitated, and sure about committing himself to mentors: all the rest was a minefield of concealed diplomatic blunders. You did not just become well known through native ability, though of course you did not acquire a name without it.
Goya was much less known in his own day than he is now, and fewer people, even in Spain, knew his work at first hand. He acquired a fairly large educated audience, which was the best a painter then could expect. People did not go for artists merely because other people, even their social superiors, thought they were “new” or “exciting.” The idea of art for a mass audience had not yet been born. Probably if you added up the total number of people in Spain in 1800 who had some awareness of this painter, it would be no more than a fraction, and a tiny fraction at that, of the number of people today who would recognize—whatever shadings you may wish to give the verb—the name of a merely fashionable star like Damien Hirst, let alone that of Jackson Pollock. Two hundred years ago, the words “famous artist” did not mean what they do today.
Goya’s career was long—unusually so, given the life expectancy of his day in Spain, when even the well-off could rarely hope to live much past fifty and workers seldom got to see the far side of thirty-five. We are apt, today, to forget that eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Spain was, in an extreme and literal sense, a culture of death.
It was not that more people died then than now. Everyone dies, sooner or later. But today, barring the horrors of mass slaughter (the specialty of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries), they die later. Then, they died sooner. The culture of death, in other words, was not the property of the old. Long working lives were rare and, when they occurred, remarkable. In most of eighteenth-century Europe, with Spain at the lower end of the scale, the normal expectation of life for the poor oscillated between twenty-seven and thirty-two years.3 This was a factor in the reverence and respect paid to old age, something that has almost vanished from our own culture. Quite simply, to reach old age was an achievement, a kind of triumph. When teenagers were as vulnerable to fatal diseases as eighty-year-olds, when the causes of epidemics were not understood, when antibiotics were unknown and medicine was hardly even a science, it was not possible to sweep death under the carpet, as modern Americans have done. Spaniards in Goya’s lifetime routinely died of afflictions that would scarcely force them to be hospitalized today, and there were many more of these afflictions: it is very unlikely that an immensely wealthy, cosseted, prominent woman in Madrid today would die at forty of a combination of tuberculosis and dengue (breakbone) fever, but that was what happened to the duchess of Alba, to whom Goya’s name is forever linked. As communications improved and the limits of the Spanish empire expanded, so did the opportunities for death from new contagious diseases, plagues, and epidemics. As cities grew, sucking in and concentrating the previously more dispersed population of the Spanish countryside, so did the danger—indeed, the near certainty—of infection from poisoned and polluted water and every kind of urban filth. To live to the age of eighty-two, as Goya did, was a great stroke of biological luck. To do so while staying sane and working right up to the end—for there is no evidence of senile decay or dementia in Goya’s last years, although physical infirmities did, of course, take their toll—was well-nigh miraculous. He was a tough, tenacious old bird, and he had every right to make, toward the end, that inspiring drawing of an ancient, bearded man, like Father Time or Kronos himself, hobbling along with the aid of two canes, “god-on-sticks” as the English critic Tom Lubbock4 aptly called him, with the scrawled caption “Aún aprendo”—“I’m still learning.”
Goya, Bordeaux Album I, 54, Aún aprendo (“I’m still learning”), 1824–28. Black chalk, 19.1 × 14.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 2.3)
Goya was exceptionally productive. He made some seven hundred paintings, nine hundred drawings, and almost three hundred prints, two great mural cycles, and a number of lesser mural projects. In his time he had a few competitors but no real rivals. He was that rarity, an artist born, raised, and working in a society strikingly short of pictorial talent who attained an astonishing level of achievement without much stimulus from peers. Goya knew quite a lot about Watteau and, in his tapestries emulated Watteau’s designs (bequeathed to him by Titi
an) for the fěte champětre, the idealized picnic of likeminded souls betokening social harmony in the open air. But there was no one else in Spain doing designs of this sort, with two exceptions: a much inferior French artist Madrid-trained named Michel-Ange Houasse and Carlos III’s court painter Luis Paret y Alcázar (1746–99), the same age as Goya, who did pleasing but superficially decorative, provincial rococo genre scenes of gallantry.
Europe had no one else like Goya, and it didn’t know about Goya himself, because Spanish art had no access to the north. But then, there was no one else like this great solitary in Spain either. He was the one and only major painter working in Spain as the eighteenth century turned the corner into the nineteenth. As far as is known, he was not significantly influenced by any of his Spanish contemporaries, although one of them, Vicente López y Portaña (1772–1850), an able classicizing follower of Mengs, did a memorably crusty and glaring portrait of Goya as an old man with palette and brushes in 1826. It shows no more trace of Goya’s influence than Goya’s portraits do of López’s but is the only finished portrait of the great man, apart from his sparse self-portraits, that still exists.
One has the impression that Goya was not much interested in the work of his Spanish contemporaries; he gave encouragement to younger ones, like Asensio Juliá, but knew that they could have little to show him. He once declared that his real masters were Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Nature. Velázquez’s works, of course, he knew intimately, being surrounded in Madrid with the largest and best collection of them in the world. He would have known Rembrandt only through prints, since so little of the Dutch master’s painted work had made its way to Spain, but then Rembrandt’s prints contain so much of the essence of Rembrandt, as Goya’s do of Goya. They are not mere records or reproductions of paintings but fully achieved works of art in their own right, and scrutinizing them must have made clear to Goya how rich the print media could be as independent, not merely reproductive, forms of expression.
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