Goya
Page 7
Throughout his working life, Goya would paint in the service of a series of absolute monarchs of the Spanish Bourbon line. For thirty-nine years, from 1789 till his death in France in 1828, he was steadily employed as a court painter. For nearly thirty of those years he was first court painter, the highest cultural office Spain had to offer in the visual arts. We are apt to think of him as a great outsider, a merciless critic of the society around him and a habitual protester against war, cruelty, and the violence of unjust authority. And so he was—in his drawings and prints and some of his small paintings. But the bigger pictures, which are just as authentically his and make up the bulk of his work, tell a different story. Work for the Spanish court, supplemented by private portrait commissions, would be his bread and butter, and he rarely seems to have found it burdensome or chafed against its constraints—except once, in 1792-94, when the routines of production for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara got him down. But this was decorative art, fětes galantes, country customs and the like, technically very demanding—not direct portraiture of living men and women in whose characters one could get interested. A century later, John Singer Sargent would prosperously moan about the tedium of churning out what he derisively called his “paughtraits.”
Not Goya—or not on the record, anyway. He was thankful to have such work, as much as he could get. Spain was not a country in which a painter could easily earn a good living. Patronage was very spotty and existed, to all intents, only in Madrid. The layer of people interested enough in the visual arts to buy paintings was exceedingly thin compared with the kind of art markets that flourished in France, Italy, and England. And although the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando had been founded in Madrid in 1752, six years after Goya’s birth, it never attained the career-making power that the comparable academies in Paris and London possessed—it was a lackadaisical, provincial affair.
But Madrid was extremely conscious of its own identity, and for some time before Goya’s arrival it had been torn with dissension over what was, and what was not, authentically Spanish. Its more educated citizens, who inevitably came from the upper and middle classes, were often open and receptive to what was going on north of the Pyrenees, in a more intellectually and culturally advanced Europe—especially in France, and to a somewhat lesser extent in Italy. The less educated were not: they suspected whatever was foreign of being unpatriotic. This rift went very deep into Spanish culture and revealed itself in bitter divisions, as the Napoleonic invasion would show.
But there were much earlier signs of it. Every so often, a state or a culture will produce an event so peculiar that you feel it could not possibly happen anywhere else, that it epitomizes something weird about the place even though its causes turn out, on inspection, to have a logic of their own.
Such an event took place in Madrid in 1766, the seventh year of the reign of the Bourbon monarch Carlos III. It was known as the Motín d’Esquilache—the Esquilache Mutiny, or the Hat and Cloak Revolt.
Before ascending to the Spanish throne, Carlos had ruled in Naples over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (consisting of Naples itself and Sicily). There he formed a strong reliance on a promising Sicilian administrator named Leopoldo de Gregorio, who had been appointed to the customs service but quickly rose to be a secretary of state in Naples, and was made marquis de Squillaci when Carlos ascended the Neapolitan throne. In 1759, when he inherited the throne of Spain, Carlos brought Squillaci with him (his name now Hispanicized as the marqués de Esquilache) and made him successively a minister of finance and, in 1763, minister for war. Esquilache would help his king in the difficult task of modernizing Spain, a project in which Carlos III ardently believed.1
Esquilache threw himself into this project with enthusiasm, tightening up the hitherto somewhat haphazard tax laws and, especially, the laws relating to public order and delinquent behavior. As a result, he was not much liked, especially not by the lower orders. Esquilache lived rather lavishly and, worse than that, he was a foreigner. And by sheer bad luck, his six years in the Ministry of Finance coincided with a long, very severe drought, which had ruinous effects on the Spanish economy, forcing up the price of all agricultural produce, especially bread. Probably no minister, however ingenious, could have kept the prices down, but Esquilache was a handy focus of popular resentment among the almost invariably xenophobic Spaniards.
Still, ministers have been known to survive worse crises. What broke Esquilache was, of all things, a matter of dress code, which he had been pursuing as an issue of criminal law. For a very long time, Spanish men had been in the habit of wearing long capes and broad-brimmed hats. The look was a staple of Spanish fashion, almost archetypal—stylish anonymity. It was also a quite effective form of disguise: pull down the brim, swathe yourself in your capa, and there was a good chance that no one would see and remember your face as you scuttled from the scene of the crime. Plus, the cloak could conceal a dagger or a sword. Here was an opening for a vigilant anti-crime crusader.
In 1766 Esquilache persuaded his king to dictate a royal edict banning long capes and wide-brim sombreros. Thenceforth only short cloaks, three-cornered hats, and small wigs could be worn in the city. This order applied to everyone, from government employees and middle-class merchants to the indigent (not that many beggars could afford the long cloak anyway). It was enforced by bailiffs, who set up trestle tables in the city and, wielding the scissors of sartorial doom, arrested offenders and summarily trimmed their garments to length. Before long, the jails of Madrid were crowded with indignant and capeless men.
This petty harassment—imagine the state of California’s banning the sale of sunglasses and ski masks on the ground that they disguised criminals, and directing all police departments from San Francisco to San Diego to arrest anyone seen wearing such accessories—was to drive madrileños of all kinds and classes almost berserk with fury. Long files of pro-cape demonstrators, their faces hidden from the authorities, paraded outside the jails. There were petitions, satires, pasquinades, street fights. After two months of this, Madrid blew up in what has been known, ever since, as the Motín d’Esquilache. On March 23, Palm Sunday of 1766, mobs broke open the jails and emptied them. Citizens tried to storm Esquilache’s town house. A number of palace guards—especially those of the Walloon infantry regiment, whose members, being foreign too, were much hated—were killed. The oil-burning streetlamps that Esquilache had installed only the year before in the streets of Madrid, a brand-new civil amenity of which he and the king were quite reasonably proud, were smashed—some 4,400 of them, each twelve feet high, iron and glass, all destroyed in a frenzy of direct protest, it seems, against illumination. To have light forced into dark corners was a sign that the king’s ministers and his foreign bureaucrats did not trust them. It was an insult, like training surveillance lamps, automatic cameras, and microphones after dark on today’s city streets.
Artist unknown, Esquilache Riot in the Spring of 1766. Engraving. Museo Municipal, Madrid. (illustration credit 3.1)
The riot worked. It put an end to the career not only of Esquilache, who had to go into exile, but of other Italian officials the king had brought with him from Naples: there would be no more high-placed foreigners running things in Carlos III’s administration. The ban on cloaks and hats was rescinded, but the conde de Aranda, who took over from Esquilache, solved the original problem with a masterstroke of lateral thinking: he decreed that the long cloak and the wide hat would, from then on, be the official uniform of Spain’s public executioners. The items immediately dropped out of fashion with the public, in Madrid and everywhere else.
The strand of symbolism running through this was almost too good to be true, and it is worth reflecting on. Esquilache was not only a foreigner but a bureaucratic ilustrado—one of those “enlightened,” reforming busybodies from beyond the Pyrenees whose presence at court was getting more and more encouragement from the “enlightened” king, Carlos III. His desire, in the interests of public harmony and orde
r, to disclose what had once been concealed—the weapon beneath the cloak, the face beneath the slouching hat brim—and to throw publicly sponsored light into the shadows of Madrid after dark (how could any creature but a bat object to that?) was a small but potent metaphor for the mighty project of éclaircissement—clarification and illumination of issues by the light of unaided Reason—that so inspired the liberal humanists of France, Italy, and Germany. Some of those descendants of Rousseau and Voltaire might have found Esquilache’s methods high-handed and intrusive, but few would have disagreed that they pointed to some kind of public good. But for the Madrid pueblo no light at all was better than foreign light. Carlos himself was exempted from the people’s blame. He was their king; hence, he had been misled or duped by the “macaronis.” For these foreign advisers, with their un-Spanish ways, no opposition could be too rancorous, no blame too sharp.
The king looked eccentric to well-placed foreign visitors. But then, mutatis mutandis, so did some of the English Georges, especially the porphyria-afflicted Third. Carlos III was short and unimposing, with a complexion the color of mahogany. He did not care about fashion: “He has not been measured for a coat these thirty years, so that it sits on him like a sack,” observed an English diplomat in Madrid. Nevertheless, added another, “with the greatest gentleness, he keeps his ministers and attendants in the utmost awe.” The courtiers would certainly have preferred a more amusing, a more “interesting” king. His pleasures were solitary rather than communal. Orchestras were not welcome in the palace, and neither were theatrical troupes; court life was said to be sunk in monastic tedium.
Carlos III is credited with bringing the European Enlightenment to Spain and encouraging it to become la ilustración española. This was true to a very limited extent, but its limits were to have long inhibiting effects on Spanish thought, education, and politics. An enlightened despot is a despot still, and the signs of despotism were everywhere in Carlos III’s reign, relatively benign and even (at times) open-minded though it may have been compared with those of his father, Felipe V, or, worse yet, his grandson Fernando VII. “Our lower orders have no more deeply held opinion than this,” wrote Pedro Rodríguez, the conde de Campomanes (1723-1802), one of the higher administrative ilustrados of the day: “The king is absolute lord of the life, the goods, and the honor of all. To cast doubt on this truth is held to be a kind of sacrilege.”2 All the efforts of Enlightenment thought in eighteenth-century Spain must necessarily be seen against the background of an unalterable belief in the divine right of kings, which no merely constitutional arguments had the power to confront.
For his part, Carlos III flatly refused to have any dealings with any courtier or politician who was not a punctilious Catholic, a believer in every last scintilla of church dogma, including the Immaculate Conception, that implausible article of faith to which the chaste king strongly adhered: each newly hired court scribe had to swear to uphold it. The idea of sin appalled him—how could anyone, he asked, possibly be so rash as to commit even a venial one?—and he went to Mass every morning. To call him enlightened, therefore, in the same sense as other eighteenth-century monarchs from Gustav III of Sweden to Maria Theresa of Austria, let alone Frederick the Great of Prussia or Catherine of Russia, is a very long stretch. One cannot imagine Carlos’s bombarding Voltaire, as the imperious Catherine did, with invitations to come and be the intellectual ornament of the royal court (or Voltaire’s accepting them, for that matter).
In most of his dealings with the world and the court, Carlos was a man of singular rigidity, perhaps the most punctilious monarch ever to occupy the Spanish throne—not that his predecessors could have been accused of informality. His favorite metaphor of political life was the clock, with its cogs and wheels ticktocking along in a regulated, invariable pattern.3 Each morning a chamberlain who slept outside his room awoke him at 5:45 precisely. The king rose, said his morning prayers, and meditated on his sins until 6:50, and at 7:00 entered the robing room, where his pulse was taken and his vital signs noted by doctors, surgeons, and herbalists. There he washed, breakfasted, and drank the first of the cups of chocolate he would consume in the course of the day, served by his Neapolitan pastry cook. (The royal appetite for chocolate was such that he was served from a giant, steaming urn that could hold gallons of it. He was, however, slightly embarrassed by his own chocoholism, and would cue his staff to replenish his cup by carefully looking the other way.) Then chapel, a visit from his sons, and at 8:00 to his study, where he worked until 11:00, conferring with his eldest son, the prince of Asturias, the future Carlos IV. Then the daily sacrament of confession, the daily meetings with the ambassadors of Naples and France. The king ate lunch on his own, but in semi-public, with courtiers watching. A painting by one of his court artists, Luis Paret, shows him at table, attended by a standing crowd (including the archbishop of Toledo, whose duty it was to recite grace) and, looking rather incongruous in the high, tapestryhung room, several hunting dogs. Their presence did not seem incongruous to Carlos III. Just as invariable as his daily dealings with prelates and diplomats were his postprandial siestas and his evening hunts.
Luis Paret y Alcazar, Carlos III Lunching Before His Court, c. 1770. Oil on panel, 50 × 64 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 3.2)
The evenings in royal company were said to induce a profound torpor. His majesty had scarcely any interest in either music or theater. His predecessor, Felipe V, had imported Europe’s most famous tenor castrato, the Italian Carlo Broschi, who sang under the name of Farinelli, from London to perform regularly in the small theater attached to the Buen Retiro Palace. For twenty-two years Felipe showered the singer with portraits, jewelry, elaborate snuffboxes, a two-mule coach, a house and staff, and an annual salary of 135,000 reales; Carlos III viewed this as a ridiculous extravagance and had Farinelli dismissed. What he really liked was to go out shooting on the grounds of one of the royal palaces in and around the city (Goya’s first major painting of the king depicted him dressed for the hunt). His two favorites were El Pardo, overlooking the Manzanares River about eight miles from the center of Madrid, whose grounds (their hunting rights reserved for the king alone) teemed with fallow deer, wild boar, and even wolves; and the royal retreat on the Tagus River at Aranjuez, some thirty miles south of the capital. He spent far more time at his retreats than in Madrid itself. As a rule, he would quit the city early in January and stay at El Pardo until Palm Sunday; from Easter to late July the court would move to Aranjuez, where the king would go hunting chochas (woodcock) and wildcats, and then relocate to La Granja for more shooting. All this shuttling between one pleasance and the next meant, as a rule, that Carlos spent only ten or twelve weeks a year in the capital, and all the rest in the country.
Goya, Carlos III in Hunting Costume, 1786-88. Oil on canvas, 210 × 127 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 3.3)
What was so “enlightened” about a way of life so given—indeed, so consumingly devoted—to piety and hunting? From a modern perspective, not very much. Carlos III needed the power of the Church and the support of the Inquisition. Without these, his power over the Spanish people would have been greatly diminished. If it was in the clergy’s interest to keep ordinary Spaniards in a permanent state of superstition and mental sloth, so be it.
It was a condition shared by better-educated people than mere proletarians. You did not need to be an ignorant prole to believe, for instance, that in 1714 the bedsheets of Felipe V and his new bride, Isabella Farnese, emitted an unearthly glow, no matter how many times they were washed; the cause was well known—not enough Masses had been said for the repose of the soul of her predecessor, María Luisa of Savoy. Fifty, seventy-five years later, this national weakness for quasi-religious superstition had not changed, and the whole structure of faith, guilt, and fear that underpinned the power of the Church had scarcely been shaken at all by the intellectual winds blowing across the Pyrenees.
If the early education of young Spaniard
s (restricted, of course, to the males) was based on rote learning, coercion, and corporal punishment, the intellectual state of the universities they graduated to—assuming that they went to university at all, which most did not—hovered between farce and disgrace. Lazy, incompetent, and reactionary teachers; obsolete curricula; chairs of theology but none of physics, botany, or astronomy. In the early eighteenth century, the French abbé Vayrac made a tour of Spain and remarked in an account of his travels that, as far as philosophy was concerned, the Spanish academics and intellectuals displayed a mulish indifference to all aspects of current European thought: they were “so much enslaved by the opinions of ancient writers” that they could not begin to comprehend modern ones, just as Spanish doctors were in medicine. “Aristotle, Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas are such infallible oracles to them that no one who fails to slavishly follow any one of the three can aspire to be called a good philosopher.”4 The same inertia affected all domains of thought. During the reign of Carlos III it was considered daring, and perhaps heretical, to acknowledge the existence of Newton or Descartes. Up-to-date books on the natural sciences, and serious philosophical texts more recent than those of ancient Greece or, at best, the medieval schoolmen, were not available: they had to be smuggled in, usually from France, and paid for at bootleg prices in bookshops that were raided at intervals by heresy-hunting authorities. Ilustrado officials complained about the situation, but their power to abolish it was limited by the clergy. One of the complaints of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, in drawing up an outline of studies for the University of Calatrava, concerned the priestly custom of reading aloud to the assembled students in the refectory at mealtimes from books full of “ignorance and superstition, swarming with apocryphal miracles, implausible and ridiculous deeds.”