The marriage, however, did cement Goya and his brothers-in-law together as a team, helping them to gather the lion’s share of commissions available in Zaragoza. In the early 1770s Goya embarked on a series of church commissions. One does not think of Goya as a religious painter because his early religious work has been so thoroughly eclipsed by the Caprichos, the Disasters of War, the portraits, and all that followed. But his early career was founded on sacred subjects. He got the commissions because, in part, he worked cheap. One of his competitors in Zaragoza, Antonio González Velázquez, had quoted the canons of Santa María del Pilar a fee of 25,000 reales for painting the ceiling of its coreto (little choir) with an allegory of the Adoration of the Holy Name. Goya cannily offered to do it for 15,000 reales, and the Building Committee for the Reconstruction of the Church of El Pilar gave him the job—subject, in view of his youth and inexperience, to some fairly stiff restrictions. He had to show that he could handle “true” fresco on plaster, and this he did by painting a sample: evidently he had learned the technique in Italy, since it was by no means commonly understood or practiced in Spain.
Goya, El nombre de Dios adorado por los ángeles (Adoration of the Holy Name), 1772. Fresco. Coreto, Basílica del Pilar, Zaragoza. (illustration credit 2.6)
The given subject was a Gloria—the glorification, by saints and angels in heaven, of the Name of God. The committee asked for sketches of the design, in color, which it would then send to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid for final approval. It seems likely that Goya did only one sketch, which was enough to convince the Zaragoza committee that there was no need to send it on to Madrid for the academy’s opinion. Goya got his contract without further ado, and completed the work in 1772.
The design he proposed was squarely in the solidified and classicized Rococo style of Corrado Giaquinto (1703–66). Goya must have first seen the Italian painter’s work in Rome, probably in the church of Santa Trinità degli Spagnoli, for which Giaquinto, working on a commission from the Spanish monarch Fernando VI, had executed the altarpiece, The Holy Trinity Freeing a Captive Slave (1750). With this work, Giaquinto had cemented his relation with the Spanish crown so firmly that, three years later, Fernando brought him to Madrid. He had remained there for nine years, most of the time working on frescoes, sculptures, and stucco decorations for the Royal Palace, the palace at Aranjuez, and other royal sites. This had been the climax of Giaquinto’s career, and he had enormous influence at the Spanish court—a foretaste, in fact, of the artistic power that the next imported artist, Anton Raphael Mengs, would wield under Carlos III. Giaquinto was first painter to the king, director of the tapestry factory of Santa Bárbara, and director of the Royal Academy of San Fernando. (All three of these exalted offices would later be filled by Mengs.) One may fairly assume that Goya, who as a young, obscure, provincial commoner would have had no access to Giaquinto’s Spanish palace decorations, would have taken care to look his work up when he was in Rome in 1771. A style that echoed Giaquinto’s would obviously be acceptable at court; apart from that, Giaquinto was about as good as painting in Spain got when Goya was starting out on his long career.
Hence the distinctly Giaquintan look of the fresco in the coreto of El Pilar: solid, handsomely fleshy groups of figures borne up on diaphanous arches of cloud, the scene dominated by an angel on the right, swinging a thurible to send up clouds of incense smoke toward the glowing, unearthly triangle that symbolizes the Trinity and bears, as an inscription, the Holy Name in Hebrew lettering. The whole scene is suffused with a golden sunset light, rendered rather smoky by time. Many of the angels in Goya’s design are glorifying the Lord by singing from musical scores, or playing instruments—lutes, violins, and horn. This suits the “little choir” where the fresco is situated, for it contains a real organ and choir stalls. Apart from its esthetic merits, this work clearly shows that young Goya cannot have been subject to vertigo; the mere idea of working on a scaffolding so high in the air is enough to make one’s head spin, which suggests that his later attacks of dizziness must have made him fear even more for his ability to work than they ordinarily would.
He did a number of religious commissions in Zaragoza, including some paintings for the oratory of the Chapel of the Counts of Sobradiel. The most important of them, however, is extremely hard to get at and see today. It was done for a cartuja, or Carthusian monastery, the Aula Dei, about fifteen miles outside the city. The Carthusians are a world-shunning, silent order, and the monastery refuses admission to women, under any circumstances. Male visitors are let in, but on strictly limited terms—a small group once a month, for about an hour. Thus, because there is never time for a really close look at the Goyas in the Aula Dei—and in any case their position, high up on the chapel wall, prevents it—these works, which are by far the largest and most ambitious of the artist’s youth, are scarcely known and not adequately studied. There can be few other works of such importance by any painter of comparable stature of which this is true. One therefore approaches the Aula Dei with curiosity and trepidation, and is not altogether disappointed.
The trouble is that several of the eleven large mural paintings, all forming a narrative of the life of the Virgin Mary, were already wrecks by the end of the nineteenth century, and others had deteriorated badly. Goya, although he had shown his competence with buon fresco in the ceiling of the choir at El Pilar, for some unknown reason chose not to use fresco at all in the Aula Dei, and instead painted the pictures—each about twenty-six to thirty-three feet long by ten high—in oils directly on the plaster walls. Moreover, he did it in a rush, and seems to have neglected the (admittedly inadequate) precautions that could be made against rising damp in the walls. Thus Goya’s paint did what oil pigments inevitably do on a damp, ill-sealed surface: it bloomed, whitened, darkened, cracked, spalled, and, within a few decades, was an irreversible mess. Neglect made things worse: during the Napoleonic occupation of Zaragoza the monks were turned out of the charterhouse and the whole place was abandoned. Later came the desamortización, or seizure and sale of Church property, in the late 1830s, in accordance with the Mendizabal laws.10 Four of the eleven paintings were completely destroyed, and all suffered irreparable damage.
Eventually the Aula Dei was reoccupied by a new group of monks, most of whom were French. These pious men wanted holy icons to aid in prayer and contemplation and decided to restore the paintings. Since at the time, the turn of the twentieth century, Goya’s reputation was small among French nonspecialists, and the Carthusians, holy though they were, were more noted for the production of the sticky liqueurs known as chartreuse than for connoisseurship, they hired a pair of French artist brothers, Paul and Amadée Buffet, to repair and in some places completely repaint Goya’s scenes. Little is known about the Buffets. Presumably they were chosen by the head monk, the padre prior. How he picked them is not known. Though the frères Buffet were, at least, not relations of the appalling Bernard Buffet, whose spiky and melodramatic style, based on drawing that resembled a peevish sea urchin, would enjoy such fame in Europe in the 1950s (and even today has its fans in Japan), their marriage with Goya cannot be said to have been an entire success. It is not at all difficult for a trained eye to pick out which parts of the murals as they are today are really by Goya, and which are by the Buffets. (The monks do not particularly care about this question of authorship, and some of them regard the presence of Goya’s mural cycle in their chapel as more a nuisance than a blessing; it brings visitors, and visitors are by definition a distraction.)
Goya, La adoración de los Reyes Magos (The Adoration of the Magi), right panel, 1774. Fresco. Aula Dei, Zaragoza. (illustration credit 2.7)
In 1902, the Buffets set to work. The worst damage had been on the lefthand walls of the chapel, as you look from the entrance to the altar. Accordingly, the Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple is now entirely the work of the Buffets; likewise the next painting, the Annunciation of Mary’s immaculate pregnancy, and the next, the Showing of the Infant J
esus to the Shepherds. The fourth scene, which is in the apse, depicting the Adoration of the Magi, is mostly Goya but with considerable additions by the Buffets. The fifth, the Flight into Egypt, is compositionally all Goya, though there may be some patching and infill by the Buffets.
The picture over the entrance presumably once depicted a pair of angels holding up the sacred name of Mary (an echo of his theme in the coreto at Zaragoza), but the cartouche or whatever it was that bore her name has disappeared, leaving the angels holding something invisible that is adored by Mary’s parents, St. Anne and St. Joachim. The angel who is speaking to St. Joachim and pointing to the angels above clearly shows the influence of Mengs, Carlos III’s court painter: he is classically conceived, sturdy, and blond.
Down the right wall the scenes begin with the Birth of the Virgin, a tightly swaddled little papoose adored by a multitude of onlookers and relatives, about half of whom are by Goya and the rest by the Buffets. Particularly Goyaesque is a group on the extreme left, of shepherds or peasants of some kind, with staves: their strong silhouettes are a prediction of the groups of bandits Goya would paint later, cloaked and conspiratorial. Next comes the Betrothal of the Virgin, which, damaged though it is, still conveys some sense of the monumental effects Goya was striving for through his use of large-scale, broadly planar drapery. A few of its passages anticipate the mature Goya and perhaps demonstrate his early knowledge of Tiepolo’s compositional devices—the crowd of figures, for instance, seen from below stage level on the left.
The scene of Mary in the House of Martha has been much repainted by the Buffets, but the apse scene after it, showing the circumcision of Jesus by the high priest, is almost all by Goya’s hand. (In general the murals that suffered most from damp and “restoration” are at the entry end of the church, and those nearest the altar have suffered least.) The Circumcision of Christ, a powerful and looming group dominated by the figure of the high priest with his horned, golden headpiece, is early Goya at his most dramatic.
Goya, Circuncisión (Circumcision), central panel, 1774. Fresco. Aula Dei, Zaragoza. (illustration credit 2.8)
The combination of Goya and his restorers, or repainters, makes a strange sight. The Buffets, it seems, were not at all interested in repairing the look of Goya’s paintings, though they may well have followed the broad structure of his monumental compositions. But they redid them in a pallid style, with silhouetted profile figures and pinky-greeny-gray coloring that derived from the most respected “official” idealist painter in France at the time, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–98). Nothing could have been less like Goya. Clearly, the Buffets felt they had a complete esthetic right to do this: they had been hired to paint the same scenes in their own manner. But the incongruity is extreme, especially if one contrasts the wan and mannered forms of the Buffets with the looming, rougher ones of Goya: the fierce, ragged energy with which the wings sprout from the shoulders of Goya’s angels on the entry wall, for instance, versus the mincing shyness with which the little Virgin Mary tiptoes up the steps of the Temple in the scene next to it. At least there is no confusing the originals with the additions. But one feels a sense of loss: what were these huge paintings originally like? Rather grand in conception and severe in drawing, if one is to judge from the surviving ones, such as the Betrothal of the Virgin (1774), whose strongly planar figures are imbued with a Poussinesque gravity, or the remarkable Circumcision. What seems quite certain is that, to judge from the Aula Dei murals in their impressive ruin, Goya had by now moved on to a more coherent and much less derivative level of achievement than he had reached two years earlier in his frescoes for El Pilar. Certainly, he was on his way. The Aula Dei paintings were, for instance, his first narrative cycle, his first essay in a mode that would occupy him, for years to come, in designing tapestries for the royal court. But one does not become a famous artist by working for a closed order of monks, and by painting murals where they could not, by monastic rules, be seen. Somehow, he had to get to Madrid.
Which Goya did, and quite soon.
By December 1774 he had almost finished the Aula Dei murals: the frames for them were ordered. In the spring of 1775 he went to Madrid to join his brother-in-law Ramón Bayeu. Now the Bayeu connection really began to pay off: a year later Goya had finished five tapestry cartoons, to be woven by the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara under the direction of his other brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu. In 1777 Francisco was appointed director of the tapestry works. A stream of commissions for designs now began to come Goya’s way. In time he would find their fulfillment a bore and an almost menial distraction, but they were his entry to court circles, and through them to the direct patronage of the Bourbon kings. Thanks to his in-laws, the twenty-nine-year-old from Aragón was on his way at last.
Goya, Portrait of Francisco Bayeu, c. 1795. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 2.9)
COMING TO THE CITY
THE MADRID to which Goya, the eager provincial, first came in 1774 was the youngest capital in Europe, and in some respects the least culturally interesting. It could not have compared with what he had seen in Italy, though it was certainly an improvement on Zaragoza.
Madrid had never been a great Gothic city like Barcelona, and its past was fairly meager. Unlike so many of the major cities of Spain, it did not stand on Roman foundations; it owed its origin to the Muslims, who, in the late ninth century, set up a fortress on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Manzanares River, intended to frustrate any Christian attempts to gain a military advantage in the Tagus Valley. But the Muslims left no remarkable buildings behind them, no relics of their presence that could even remind the visitor of the architectural wonders of Sevilla or Granada. The decisive turn in the city’s life came in the mid-sixteenth century, when the Hapsburg emperor Charles V decided to establish his court there. He did so for the most sterile of reasons: Madrid is in the (more or less) exact geographical center of Spain. It is equally close to, and equally far from, everywhere else on that ragged quadrilateral of a peninsula. Pitching a capital there avoided favoring any locality or cultural grouping. Besides, absolute rulers tend to dislike ports: they are too open to the rest of the world, too labile, too prone to foreign influence.
Madrid grew rapidly as soon as it was declared to be the future Hapsburg capital. The population figures, rough though they are, tell the story. About 4,000 people lived in this sleepy, dusty hole in the middle of the high Spanish plateau, separated from the sea and the rest of Europe by appalling roads, in 1530; thirty years later, there were close to 20,000; by 1598, some 60,000; and by 1621, nearly 150,000—this at a time when the population of many northern capitals was shrinking, partly due to outbreaks of plague. What drove this increase was an industry: the industry of government, the gravitational pull of the court. This fierce rate of growth slowed somewhat during the rest of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. When Goya got to Madrid the city contained about 148,000 souls: not a big town, nor one that offered a broad-based or very active art market.
It could boast public baths, fountains, paved and sometimes tree-lined streets. It was also mean, dirty, and lacking in amenities, except for the rich—and it was not always exceptionally comfortable for them either. Their palaces were smaller than they would have been in Italy or London; the grandest were no more than four stories high.
Modes of interior decoration were certainly changing, in conformity with those of northern Europe. The social satirist Ramón de la Cruz, whose plays enjoyed great popularity on the Madrid stage, wrote about how cornucopias were replacing displays of lances and armor, signaling that families no longer needed to show off their descent, real or imagined, from the good old days of chivalry; and he poked fun, without much actual justification, at how painted wallpaper and printed cottons were displacing the old pictures by “Velázquez, Ribera, and other pintorcillos [little painters] of that kind.” But if they were doing so—and not many families had Velázquezes or Riberas to take down—it wa
s only because an international neoclassical style, as practiced by Madrid architects like Ventura Rodríguez and Juan de Villanueva, reigned in Madrid as it did in Rome, Paris, and London, and painted Chinese wallpapers and printed fabrics were part of that style. Such backgrounds can be seen frequently in the portraits by Goya.
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